The following appeared in a letter from a homeowner to a friend."Of the two leading real estate firms in our town—Adams Realty and Fitch Realty—Adams Realty is clearly superior. Adams has 40 real estate agents; in contrast, Fitch has 25, many of whom work

The author claims here that among the two real estate firms- Adams Reality and Fitch Reality, Adams is clearly superior. To support his statement, the author provides evidence in favor of Adams- stating how their workforce is bigger, how much more revenue it generates and the lesser amount of time taken to sell a home with Adams. However while providing these evidences, the author makes certain assumptions, which are rather unfounded. Careful scrutiny reveals several instances of poor reasoning in the argument and thus renders it unconvincing and unsubstantiated.

Firstly, the author tries to convince his friend that Adams Reality is better than Fitch, by stating that Adams has a greater number of real estate agents as compared to Fitch. However he fails to mention the exact number of agents who are working full time. It may be so, that Adams, despite possessing a greater number of agents may require only a part time commitment from all of them. One can also state the possessing a greater number of employees may not necessarily increase the superiority of a firm. Rather such a conclusion can be definitively drawn based on the number of houses sold by the firm in the preceding fiscal year. If this statistic is made available, one can easily determine which of the two firms is better.

Secondly, the author remarks how quickly Adams Reality was able to sell his home, as compared to Fitch. But here the author assumes the two instances, separated by a decade, can be correlated as such. It is possible that the home that the author sold ten years ago was located at a remote area, which made it difficult to sell. Even if the two homes sold were located close to one another, perhaps the area has become highly industrious in the last ten years, leading to an increased demand in real estate, providing a potential explanation as to why the second home sold much more quickly. To correlate correctly, one has to consider the price of real estate in the locations where the homes were located, and compare them, adjusting for inflation, growth and a myriad of other factors. Only then one can infer whether Adams was indeed more efficient than Fitch.

Furthermore the author makes a statement in the second paragraph comparing the revenue of the two firms. However the fact that Adams has a higher revenue does not imply that it sells more homes than Fitch. It is possible that Adams charges a higher fees for every home sold, accounting for its higher income as compared to Fitch. A more justified approach would be to compare the number of homes sold by either firm in the last financial year. This would give incontrovertible proof regarding the performance of either firm.

In conclusion, it may be stated that due to lack of proper evidence, the author’s argument is unpersuasive as it stands. Perhaps if the author could include the result of some of the studies mentioned above, a better inference could be drawn.