I’m sometimes not sympathetic when homebuilders complain to the press that they unfair press coverage, but consider this:
Yesterday, MSNBC ran a story that new home sales were down 2.6 percent in the month of June. Today’s front page headline story about housing is entitled “Still slumping: New-home Sales Drop Again.” If you actually read that article, you’ll discover that the figures quoted yesterday were actually revised significantly downward, from 2.6% to .6%! Yet, still the article depicts an environment of gloom and doom. Finally, if you read the last paragraph of the article, they break the figures down by geography and, lo and behold, the Northeast actually experienced a 5.3% new sales increase. (Good news for those of us in Philadelphia...)
It just goes to show that trusting national news outlets to gain a snapshot of regional real estate markets is risky business…
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I have been struggling to find the figures I saw on TV, but locally here in Florida, the news is: Home sales UP, average price DOWN compared to June of last year. One of my bigger clients down here, Centex Homes, had sold of its entire standing inventory of finished homes by the end of March. Since then, all their sales have been for to-be-built homes. That speaks volumes. The inventory, caused by massive speculative buying and flipping, was the albatross hanging from the necks of every developer. Inventories are gone now. If the media gets it right, I think you'll see stories like "home prices actually rose slightly in Florida, indicating we may have already hit the bottom and are on the way back up again."
My bone to pick with news sources is how they milk one piece of bad news and then LOOK for how they can weave it into other bad news. I'm surprised we don't see stories on TV like "Hear how the high price of gasoline is predicted to bog down the real estate market for years to come... after these messages."
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