I thought I would add my two cents on today’s major headline, before heading home to enjoy the evening. I don’t know if any of you caught the pending home sales number today, but if you did, you probably were misled.
As we all the know, you can find the glass half-empty or half-full depending on what you are reading. Most of today’s press was the half-empty crowd. Dating back to my degree in mass media communications at UW; the media’s message that sells can be broken down to three major categories:
1. sensationalize.
2. Sensationalize
3. SENSATIONALIZE!
Here is an example from the media: “Pending Home Sales Fall in the Double Digits!” or “Pending Home Sales Nose Dive!”
Here is the real headline: “Pending home sales fall, but year over year have significant increase; and in the west (ie….where we live), pending sales drop just 2.7 percent”
Getting to my point, remember that real estate is local. It always has been and always will be. In fact real estate really should be looked at as tiny micro-climates (city to city or even neighborhood to neighborhood).
Judging by today’s headlines, one might think that we are headed back to the abyss. The only headline today worth really reporting was written by Eric Pryne of the Seattle Times (read here). He looked at the numbers here in King County. It pays to understand what we read.
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