How the Media Impacts the Market

How the Media Impacts the Market
Earlier this week I wrote about the Economic Outlook 2007 conference I attended. Two highly respected authorities on the economy and real estate in Phoenix, Arizona spoke to the fact that the current state of the market is more “normal” and the past few years of boom were an anomaly. I felt rather positive after leaving the conference and spent the next few days telling many the message I learned.

Then I turned on the evening news.

Two local stations were both doing stories on the poor state of the housing market. One did a
feature on desperate sellers who were resorting to auctioning their home. Another story featured a local seller who was offering a new motorcycle with the sale.

The next morning a national news program ran a story on challenging an agent to sell a house in one week. Each day they check in with her to see how things are going and speculate on how successful she might be.

Rarely can I have a conversation without someone asking me how I am handling the ‘bad real estate market’. I can quote positive sales figures until I’m blue in the face and it won’t matter. Inevitably the person I am speaking with will tell me I must be wrong because they heard on the news or read in the paper that the housing market is bad, the bubble is burst, and people are losing money.

Yes, the market has slowed and the rate of appreciation has certainly decreased from the past few years but all is not lost. How do we go about educating the consumer that things are not as bad as they hear on the evening news?