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It's funny, because if anything, I think the media underplayed the whole thing. I don't know if it was on their radar as anything other than "fill". Every time Lawrence Yun opened his mouth, they quoted him verbatim with glowing headlines and chipper tags.
We realized we'd be moving last October. That's when I started prepping the house for selling. And reading up on the markets-- googling "housing", reading city data and blogs. The media was talking about "softening" and "recovery," but some of the blogs had laid out math that was downright frightening.
After just a couple months of looking at those figures, we made the decision to list our house in the slow month of January instead of waiting for the spring selling season. The numbers looked so frightening, we thought if we didn't sell immediately, we'd have trouble selling at all.
We sold.
Then, all spring and summer, people blithely told me, "It's a buyers' market," as if everything was normal. The media obviously hadn't clued them in that it was a knife catching festival and that something really bad was about to happen.
I'll be honest. Until very recently I didn't know if I was paranoid or justified about my concerns with the housing/financial markets. I'm not an economist. But if I had relied on the mainstream media to clue me in to what was going on with the big picture, I'd be in a heap of trouble right now.
Not going to argue much of this post because it's just a waste of time, however, what "heap of trouble" would you be in had you Bought? Are you trying to buy something more than you can afford that could jeopardize your ability to pay in the near future? Are/were you planning to buy and re-sell short term? If the answer is NO to "all the above" then it makes no sense to say you'd be in a "heap of trouble".
Not going to argue much of this post because it's just a waste of time, however, what "heap of trouble" would you be in had you Bought? Are you trying to buy something more than you can afford that could jeopardize your ability to pay in the near future? Are/were you planning to buy and re-sell short term? If the answer is NO to "all the above" then it makes no sense to say you'd be in a "heap of trouble".
For one thing, my home would've lost about 70k in principal by now-- screwing me royally if I needed to move within the next few years. Since the Board of Trade Futures on Chicago Housing are predicting -12% over the next year (and anyone else who has actual data instead of just opinions is also saying we're still in decline), my principal balance would still be dropping right now. Perhaps making a potential move in a few or even several years financially impossible. No, I'm not planning to flip, but since the average tenure in a home these days is 6-7 years, it doesn't seem unreasonable to believe there might be a reason I'd want or need to move.
Even without the move scenario, I'm not a trust fund baby. Saving 70k in principal would add up to saving 150k over the life of the loan. 150k I could potentially invest. That's money I'm going to need for retirement-- and keep in mind, the market is still dropping.
I have PAGES of data on my computer about my local market. One house we were interested in was priced at 629k in April. Know what it's at today? 474.9K. And IT'S STILL NOT MOVING.
Our local average days-on-market is worse than "Bubble Capital of the World" Miami, FL. Our inventory is at 11+ months going into the slowest selling season of the year during a global economic crisis. What do you think is coming next?!
I know the it's-all-on-paper, no-damage-till-you-sell stuff. I get it. But the first part of getting a good deal as a seller is getting a good deal as a buyer.
I stand by what I said. I'd be in trouble if we'd bought in January or April. The short term and monthly payment isn't the only thing I need to consider.
I hope this is not a serious question. Are you kidding? Examples are daily, by the second on every and any report. Just watch the "drama unfold".
Honestly, can we stop confusing "reporting" the mess with "creating" the mess?
If the National Association of Home Builders takes a poll and finds out that confidence is at an all-time low or that cancellations are at an all-time high, how did the media "create" that mess?
If the NAR, Census Bureau or Case Shiller find that prices are down 10%, 20% or 40% in an area, how did the media manage to do it? Unless every home buyer out there is personally employed by "the media," I don't think it's their fault.
Are you going to say it's their fault for reporting facts? Should we censor them? Or dictate what and how much they can report?
Please cite specific examples of what is their fault in all this. What did they do besides report news and fact?
I just watched Jim Rogers on Bloomberg and he's certainly not putting any money into real estate or stocks right now. He says the only safe thing to invest in right now is commodities as we're about to enter an "inflationary holocaust". His words, not mine.
Jim Rogers is one of the most legendary investors ever, a self made billionaire.
Well you have to think for yourself. i.e. Donald Trump said this is the best time to buy a house.
Honestly, can we stop confusing "reporting" the mess with "creating" the mess?
If the National Association of Home Builders takes a poll and finds out that confidence is at an all-time low or that cancellations are at an all-time high, how did the media "create" that mess?
If the NAR, Census Bureau or Case Shiller find that prices are down 10%, 20% or 40% in an area, how did the media manage to do it? Unless every home buyer out there is personally employed by "the media," I don't think it's their fault.
Are you going to say it's their fault for reporting facts? Should we censor them? Or dictate what and how much they can report?
Please cite specific examples of what is their fault in all this. What did they do besides report news and fact?
They choose very carefully what news and facts they report in order to put a particular spin on things. To anyone who is involved in any of the fields that they report on, this is blatantly obvious. To someone on the sidelines, perhaps not so much.
Myself, I tend to be the kind of person who researches things. (One of the few acceptable excuses for leaving my room after bedtime when I was little was to look something up in the encyclopaedia, because my parents knew I would lie awake wondering - they just put the encyclopaedia right outside my door.) If you do that, you find out that there's a whole lot of "rest of the story" and "other side of the story" that you don't hear.
The media, in general, chooses the most dramatic, "car wreck" type stories because, sad to say, that's what sells - it's what sells newspapers, it's what draws eyeballs to the monitor and the TV screen, so that advertising can be sold. It actually makes sense from their point of view, because they get paid for doing that, but the problem is, people actually BELIEVE they're getting the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth from the media stories that are anything but, or they act as if they do, and tend to panic when panic is the last thing they should be doing, and then you have the "self-fulfilling prophecy" effect.
Well you have to think for yourself. i.e. Donald Trump said this is the best time to buy a house.
I agree. Also, investing in the stock market is gambling IMO. I came to this conclusion in economics class. I had to stifle my giggles when I learned how the world economy actually works. . .
If someone won a 10 billion dollars in Vegas, would you take their financial advice?
The best time to buy anything is when prices are low, right? When prices are high, I think ppl think 'Hey everyone else is buying' so they feel more comfortable spending money. But it doesn't make much sense. It's like buying clothes on sale. You can pay $100 for the trendy shirt that every one is wearing, or $10 for a wearable shirt that may be out of vogue.
Speaking of which, I went to dinner with my DH today and we saw a girl and her mom dressed to the NINES. The daugher was wearing the new skinny-heeled platforms that XYZ designer is selling. A'la these ones on Victoria Beckam: GalerÃas de imágenes I guess SOMEONE still has tons of money. . .
They choose very carefully what news and facts they report in order to put a particular spin on things. To anyone who is involved in any of the fields that they report on, this is blatantly obvious. To someone on the sidelines, perhaps not so much.
The media, in general, chooses the most dramatic, "car wreck" type stories because, sad to say, that's what sells - it's what sells newspapers, it's what draws eyeballs to the monitor and the TV screen, so that advertising can be sold. It actually makes sense from their point of view, because they get paid for doing that, but the problem is, people actually BELIEVE they're getting the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth from the media stories that are anything but, or they act as if they do, and tend to panic when panic is the last thing they should be doing, and then you have the "self-fulfilling prophecy" effect.
But NAHB, NAR, Case Shiller, OHFHEO are all reports that are featured in the economic news regardless of how the market is doing. Sure, they're louder about it when the numbers are setting records, but that's appropriate. And they reported just as loudly when the numbers were setting records on the way up.
When houses were going up, it was because they were worth so much. But now that they're going down, it's because of the media? Is this the same media that prints the "Showcase of Homes!" section every week with pages and pages of glowing articles and hasn't managed to acknowledge the sheer volume of foreclosure ads in their own classified section with even a paragraph mention? Maybe it's different in your area, but out here, the spin seems like willful denial if anything.
What this reminds me of more than anything is a housing project in Boston that had constant trouble with shootings, stabbings, drugs, etc. They held a rally of their residents to discuss the cause of their problems. You know who they blamed? The media.
I have read and agreed with a lot of your posts. This one isn't among them.
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