They spent a 5 minute segment on documenting the latest statistics. I’m curious about the timing…indicators have been negative for the past few months but a major news agency breaks the “story” at the notional end of the selling season for a lot of the country?
I’m not, BTW, in the camp that believes that the media has huge lag in reporting trends. They’re great collectors of both hard and soft (anecdotal) data. I think that the editorial layer adds a lot of jitter to the timing of the data. They do lag, of course…they can only report what they see.
5 minutes is pretty big for the nightly news. Between 1/4 and 1/3 of a newscast. Did they do any predictive analysis? Did they put an RE shill on to refute/soften what is happening?
I met a realtor today while he had a realtor open house, and he told me the U-T is a foe of realtors. They only print sensational stories: housing frenzy on the way up, housing bubble on the way down. He wonders why the realtors even bother advertising with the U-T. Answer: because they are “the only game in town”.
It was the lead story and yes, they interviewed an Agent, her client who was selling a home near DC (IIRC) and some blathering MSNBC in-house economic “expert” whose name I did not catch. Sorry, I don’t put a lot of stock in media-funded SMEs.
There were no predictions cast, just data on the drop in sales and a passing remark about how “patience, like inventory, remains high on the part of the sellers.” The client that they profiled has had her place on the market for several months now. The Agent did make a telling remark (paraphrasing): “The home is worth what the buyer will pay…” I swear that she had that deer in the headlights look about her during the interview.
A sea change from the “Real Estate can only go up” mantra!
It was mister happy himself, David Lereah from the NAR on that segment. Of course he was trying to put the “normal market” spin on it, but I did notice that he had very little spirit left in his voice. It was almose as though he could barely stand his own bulls!it anymore. To be challenged with such damaging evidence on a national stage seemed to rattle him a bit like finally someone was going to see that he was totally full of it.
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