All the good real estate news that’s fit to print

I’ve been accused of being overly negative when it comes to covering the residential real estate industry. People have told me that I’ve been focusing too much on all the foreclosures, vacant homes and falling prices.

Well, if you’d like some good news to go along with my daily dose of pessimism, then I’ve found the perfect site: www.happyrenews.com. That’s right folks, it’s really called Happy Real Estate News.com. Seriously.

OK, I didn’t find this out on my own. Mary Umberger, the top-notch real estate columnist for the Chicago Tribune, wrote about it in the June 8 Chicago Tribune. But the site was too sunny to not spotlight here. The site’s front page shows bright-yellow sunflowers in a green grassy field. Not sure what that has to do with real estate, but what the heck, it sure does look happy.

There is some truth on the site, too, despite all the sunny optimism. The front page, for instance, mentions that there isn’t one national residential real estate market. This is true, and it’s important. Just because home values are plummeting in parts of Arizona, that doesn’t mean things are nearly as gloomy in my neck of the woods, near Chicago.

The site lists markets where housing sales are actually up. And there are quite a few. Unfortunately, despite how sunny this particular site is, there are many other markets where both home sales and housing prices are falling.

There’s no way around it, folks. The residential real estate market today stinks. It shouldn’t have surprised anyone, because real estate goes up and down all the time. But all the www.happyrenews.com sites in the world won’t change that.