Are the media ignoring the good news about real estate?
Yesterday, the real estate trade magazine at which I am the managing editor, Metro Chicago Real Estate Magazine, hosted its first residential real estate summit. At the event, which took place in downtown Chicago, panels of the city’s top real estate brokers and top-producing real estate agents discussed the current market and ways in which real estate professionals could survive in it.
One theme kept coming up: Real estate agents need to shine some light on the bright side of our current real estate market. They have to do this, the panelists said, because the news media are only focusing on the negative side.
I wondered if this is true? Are the media only telling one side of the story when it comes to the residential real estate market? To be sure, the numbers are the numbers: Home sales are down, housing prices are stagnant or falling, homes on sitting on the market longer, foreclosures are up. Those are facts.
But what the speakers said — and these were the most successful real estate players in Chicago and its suburbs — was that the news media were ignoring the positives about this market. For instance, this is a great market in which to buy a home. But the media rarely mention this.
David Kasprisin, a branch manager with Countrywide, put it this way: The media can sell hot or they can sell cold. They can’t sell in the middle. Put simply: Newspapers, magazines and television can sell stories about a red-hot real estate market. They can sell them about one that’s collapsed. But they can’t sell them when the market is in the middle. And to Kasprisin, what we’re seeing now is not a residential real estate collapse, but the sight of the residential market returning to normal.
All the panelists agreed that the real estate market we saw in 2004 and 2005 — when homes seemed to sell before they were even listed — is not coming back. That market, they agree, was an irrational one. What we need is a calmer market, one where houses do appreciate, but not by the double-digit yearly increases we saw during the real estate boom.
The panelists also warned attendees that while we’ll undoubtedly see a strong real estate market again — probably beginning sometime in 2009 — we’ll also one day see another housing slump. Real estate is a cyclical business after all.
As Jim Merrion, regional director of RE/MAX Northern Illinois, put it: There’s little you can do to prevent another downturn. But you can always remember that every downturn, even the most severe, is only temporary.
