Sunday, July 24, 2005

More About Real Estate Bloggers

This is another article about blogging's influence on real estate. Ben Jone's thehousingbubble2.com site is mentioned as well as housebubble.com. The article points out that some bloggers are distrustful of the media. In my opinion, there is a certain amount of conspiratorial content in some of the real estate blogs, but this stems from naivete about some issues, rather than tin-foil hat type nuttiness. I don't, in general, subscribe to the idea that the media is purposefully trying to limit talk about the bubble, as I believe many mainstream papers are doing a good job of following the bubble's progress. The NY Times provides consistent coverage, as well as The Wall Street Journal, The LA Times and the Washington Post.

On the other hand, our local paper, The Asbury Park Press has not done any hard hitting exposes about the state of real estate at the Shore. Some might attribute the lack of coverage to maybe the paper's perceived reluctance to upset all of their real estate advertisers. I would guess that this is not the case and that the reason the Asbury Park Press doesn't cover the bubble is because the paper's business section is just a collection of Associated Press Wire stories. Also, the Impact Section on Sunday's usually doesn't have much room on Sunday's on account of the bi-monthly story about the joys of recycling.

Snip...

[Indeed, distrust of the mainstream media runs deep with bloggers.

Mickey Cheng, 42, a computer programmer in Thousand Oaks and a regular reader of the Housing Bubble 2, maintains his own site at housebubble.com.

"Newspapers are so heavily influenced by the real estate industry that they don't give you the correct view of the situation," he said.

Cheng, a renter, is waiting for home prices to fall back to Earth before buying again. In February, Cheng sold his 1,400-square-foot home for $560,000; he bought the house in 1993 for $215,000. He currently leases a two-story home with a three-car garage for $2,400 a month.]

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