It reminded me of those speculative conversations about what some (fill-in-the-blank) owner, tenant or manager would do. Lots of hunches and gut feelings -- few hard facts. The difference with baseball, of course, is that there is a mountain of accurate, publicly-available statistics to prove a point. And still it's hard to change minds.

Real estate data, by contrast, is private and much more subjective. For example, the New York Times wrote recently about the economist Steven Levitt and his provocative research, "The Probablility That a Real-Estate Agent Is Cheating You" (Aug 3, 2003). Levitt, who studied 50,000 home sales in Cook County, IL, found that "Real estate agents' homes stayed on the market about 10 days longer and sold for 2 percent more." So Levitt argues that agents do a better job of selling their own homes than their clients' homes. Oh-oh. Is this true?

--Peter Pike