If there is one person in our real estate industry that I truly feel empathy for, it’s Jonathan Miller.
Let me explain.
Jonathan is the appraiser behind the market reports most of our industry quotes. I first met him in the late ‘90s, when he was just starting to put them together. Back then, his biggest problem was bad data. Today, his biggest problem is that some of the data is disappearing altogether.
Agents generally don’t share confidential information. Unless, of course, it’s to promote their personal brand or get press.
Note: whenever you see a news report of a sale and it says the agent “declined to comment,” it generally means the agent called the reporter, gave them the information, and told them not to use their name.
As the data became less reliant on agents, the data got better.
When I started CORE in 2005, one of the first things I did was create The CORE RealTime Report. It was the first of its kind report to track “contracts signed” rather than “closed sales.”
I felt then, and still feel now, that if you’re looking to gauge the health of a real estate market, the best moment to track that data is when a contract is actually signed. Closings tell you what happened months ago. Contracts tell you what is happening right now.
We couldn’t always get the contract amount, but we had the last asking price and the contract-signing date, and we did our best.
When the RealTime Report came out, The New York Times ran an article about tracking contract data to get a better pulse on the market. I was quoted as saying, “The best thing for both the consumer and the agent is full transparency.”
The day the article came out, I received an aggravated call from the CEO of one of the largest brokerages in the city, lambasting me for exposing weaknesses in the market.
I argued that the faster the client got educated about the market, the more effectively we could represent them. I always believed that transparency was good for the consumer and, in turn, good for agents. An educated consumer is a good client. Right?
Turns out—not everyone agreed. Why? Because the data told the story they didn’t want you to hear.
Now, I’m not going to pretend I’m a data purist. I’ve used it to tell the story I wanted.
One of the best marketing books I ever read was How to Lie with Statistics, a classic 1954 book by Darrell Huff that explains how numbers and graphs can be manipulated to tell the story you want them to tell.
The book inspired me to use industry data to showcase our expertise.
At CORE, we weren’t the biggest. We weren’t the oldest. But the data proved that we sold more real estate per agent than any other company in the market.
So I went with it, and that’s the stat I pushed to tell our story: If you were looking to hire an expert agent, hire a CORE agent.
That’s using statistics to tell your story. I’ll own that.
There’s a difference between using statistics to tell the story you want to tell and making sure the statistics never exist in the first place.
Market reports can only report on the market they can see. And increasingly, parts of our market are being intentionally hidden.
Brokerages are building private listing networks, holding inventory inside their own walls and controlling who gets to see it and when.
Some sellers have always legitimately needed privacy. Celebrities. Public figures. People going through divorces. People who simply don’t want the world knowing their business.
That’s different.
Privacy is something a client asks for.
Controlling information is something the industry does for itself.
And this isn’t just Jonathan’s problem. Every seller wants to know what their apartment is worth. Every buyer wants to know whether they’re overpaying. Every developer wants to know what they should build and what they can charge for it. Every lender wants to know what they’re lending against.
They all rely on the same thing – information.
This is what I find so strange about where we are today.
Consumers have never had more information. They can see sales history, taxes, floor plans, price changes, mortgage estimates, and almost everything else from their phone.
At the same time, members of our industry have decided the answer is to give them less.
The irony is that technology has made the real estate market more transparent than at any point in history, while certain real estate firms are moving in the opposite direction.
We’re turning the clock back 30 years. Right back to where Jonathan started, when the only people who knew what was really happening were the ones with a reason not to tell you.
And when we hide inventory from each other, we don’t just hide it from other agents.
We hide it from buyers.
We hide it from sellers trying to understand the value of their own homes.
And ultimately, we hide it from the very people trying to help us understand exactly what is happening in the market.
What we miss is that Jonathan might just be one of our strongest allies, not our greatest adversary.
Good data doesn’t make a market good or bad.
It just tells us what is happening.
We can all choose the stats that tell the story we want; I certainly have.
But before we can lie with statistics, we at least need the data.
Maybe instead of blaming Jonathan when we don’t like what the numbers say, we should make sure he has all the numbers.
This guest column was written by Shaun Osher, Founder of CORE Group Marketing and author of the Padkos Blog. It was originally published October 5, 2026, at Housing Notes.
