The latest survey by Move.com and Realtor.com peppers you with so many countervailing statistics it's hard to figure out what exactly's going on. Maybe that's the point.

See if you can make sense out of these three inconsistent sentences pulled from a press release. I pretty much gave up:

• While 5.8% plan to purchase a home in the next 12 months, 12.8% of Americans say they plan to buy a home in the next two years and 11% plan to purchase a home in two to five years.
• 23% of Americans plan to buy a home in the next five years
• 18.1% of adults plan to buy a home this year in order to take advantage of the $8,000 tax credit recently passed by Congress in the administration’s economic stimulus package.

If I read this correctly, the first sentence says 29.6 percent of Americans plan to buy in the next five years. I got that by adding the three numbers. The second sentence says that number is 23 percent. The third sentence contradicts the first sentence by providing triple the number of prospective home purchasers in 2009 (or in the next 12 months).

The survey of 1,005 adults was conducted March 6-8. I know Realtor.com is essentially part of a trade/lobbying group representing hundreds of thousands of real estate agents. It's paid to spin. But at least they could coordinate the spin so that the facts aren't smacking into each other like in that 1970s Battling Tops game.

UPDATE: My apologies for the math error that double counted the 5.8 percent. The 23 percent cited in sentence two is correct. (Hat tip to Frank Lee).

If you're so inclined, you can access the survey here.