We scour the real estate message boards, and one constant theme among real estate agents is that the media has fanned the flames of the housing crisis, scaring away precious customers. Au contraire. If anything, the media has been too easy, primarily because they are too lazy to do their homework.
Maybe most of us slack off a little at holiday time, but the mainstream media laziness in reporting on the real estate mess in the U.S. knows no season. Their speed dial always seems set to the chief economist at the National Association of Realtors. Asking the National Association of Realtors about the real estate market is like asking McDonalds about obesity. You are never going to get a straight (read "honest") answer.
The Christmas Day present in my email inbox was yet another piece of lazy journalism, this time by Wall Street Journal Online and Marketwatch reporter Amy Hoak. I offer Ms. Hoak's opening sentences unexpurgated: "After a year of falling house prices in numerous parts of the country and a meltdown in the mortgage market that affected borrowers regardless of their ZIP code, many hope that housing markets will finally start to get better next year...But if there's any improvement in 2008, it may be relatively modest."
How's that for investigative journalism? State the blindingly obvious (prices are falling, the mortgage infrastructure is a mess), the cloyingly banal (many hope the market will get better) and then wrap it all up with the startling conclusion that gains in 2008 "may be relatively modest." Small wonder she gets some of her insights from the NAR's Chief Economist, Lawrence Yun. We thought we were past all this when David Lareah, the NAR's former chief economist and the market's foremost Polyanna, retired to Florida where he is no doubt sitting around the pool telling his fellow 60-somethings that there is no condo problem in Miami.
But Yun and his cronies at the NAR have clearly embraced the Lareah legacy, although without the strictly glass-always-full optimism. Their approach is more three-quarters full, one-quarter empty. "The National Association of Realtors predicts a slight increase in existing-home sales next year, but a decline in new-home sales," Ms. Hoak writes. In the face of escalating foreclosures, tightening of credit, huge unsold inventories of homes, new home starts that have ground to a halt, ugly government data, and most sane economists' predictions of gloom well into 2009, the boys at the NAR still cannot admit the glass is empty. Not content to leave it at that, Yun tells Ms. Hoak that a low interest rate on mortgages "should have provided a lift to home sales, but it has not."
In other words, he wasn't wrong. Those of us who didn't buy over-priced houses were.
No wonder there's a blogosphere.
