Please rate my essay! Any replies will be appreciated :)

[heehlim]

I need your help! Thanks in advance :)

 

 

 

Here is the prompt :

 

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 only part-time. Moreover, Adams' revenue last year was twice as high as that of Fitch and included home sales that averaged $168,000, compared to Fitch's $144,000. Homes listed with Adams sell faster as well: ten years ago I listed my home with Fitch, and it took more than four months to sell; last year, when I sold another home, I listed it with Adams, and it took only one month. Thus, if you want to sell your home quickly and at a good price, you should use Adams Realty."

 

Write a response in which you examine the stated and/or unstated assumptions of the argument. Be sure to explain how the argument depends on these assumptions and what the implications are for the argument if the assumptions prove unwarranted.

 

 

 

My response is... :

 

The author recommends Adams Realty for quick sell-out and good price based on his experiences and observations. However, there are some logical fallacies in which the author derived the superiority of Adams Realty. The examples he mentioned, including higher total sales and average sale rice, his own house’s case, and bigger agent number, do not necessarily indicate that Adams Realty sell houses quicker and at better value than Fitch does. To verify his claim, the author needs to check several assumptions he implicitly made throughout his argument.

 

First, the author assumes higher average sales price at Adams means that Adams Realty’s competency successfully sold their listed houses at better value than Fitch did. However, this is resulted from a weak assumption that all houses sold last year are priced at similar level. If there were one or two luxury mansions listed at Adams, say around $400,000 for each house, they would have raised the average sales price by great extent while the rest of Adam’s houses were sold relatively at lower price, for example around $100,000. In contrast, Fitch might have sold houses most of which were priced at similar values, around $140,000. In this case, it is definitely not reasonable to conclude that Adam’s Realty is good at securing high value of listed houses.

 

Second, the author claims that Adam’s can sell out houses more quickly than Fitch’s assuming that only the competency of each real estate firm resulted in different duration of sell-out. This, however, needs to be checked by reviewing other external factors that might have influenced how long it took for each real estate firm to sell the author’s listed house. For example, the quality of house could have been different. If the author listed a well-maintained, beautiful house on Adam’s last year while he listed an old, dirty house on Fitch’s ten years ago, it is not surprising to see the former one took shorter time to find someone who like it. In addition, the author has to look if the real estate industry was under different economic circumstances between the two cases. People’s wealth and propensity to buy new houses are highly influenced by economic state, and if the town was under economic depression ten years ago, the real estate firm should not be the only to be blamed for lower housing demand.

 

Last but not least, the author implicitly argues that bigger number of full-time agents at Adam’s than at Fitch’s may lead to better quality and competency of real estate, which is represented by quicker sell-out and higher price here. Whether the absolute number of agents can directly result in superior quality of real estate deal should be further verified, though. This can be false if most of the agents at Adams are inept and novice whereas the agents at Fitch’s are highly experienced and skilled. The author needs to look at the quality of each agent more carefully to determine whether the mere size of agents can be determinant of real estate’s quality.

 

In sum, concluding that Adam’s Realty is more recommendable than Fitch’s Realty is not yet backed by sufficient and logical evidence. In order to fully understand and compare the quality of each Realty, the author needs to look in-depth at the factors that were mentioned above.