Millions of housing consumers, threatened with losing their homes, thirst for accurate information and pointed direction.
They'd also like a little consideration, perhaps some consolation, from an industry that snared them with deals that too often were too good to be true or worse -- a bill of goods.
With some homeowners months away from losing their homes, time is of the essence. They don't have time to engage in petty blame games.
It is counter productive, irresponsible and a position of denial when industry leaders dribble on about the media spawning, exacerbating or prolonging the housing market's downturn.
Any real estate professional who has spent just a few cycles in the business ought to know better.
Unfortunately, that didn't stop Tom Knuz, CEO of Century21 Real Estate, from the latest media bashing in "No Housing Turnaround for Two Years?", a Business Week magazine article published online.
In the context of his comments, the magazine first paraphrased the issue, writing: "Despite the ugly national picture, Realtors are forging ahead, turning the focus to local real estate markets and buying opportunities -- and blaming the media for the continued decline in home sales."
The story immediately follows with the quote: "The numbers are the numbers. People are going to come home tonight, have dinner, turn on the TV, and see that home sales declined. They're going to look at that and say, 'Hell, I'll sit on the fence,' said Tom Kunz, chief executive officer of Century21 Real Estate, a division of privately held Realogy."
For some, maybe sitting on a fence in this market isn't such a bad idea.
An unfortunate number of potential home buyers and owners facing foreclosures, don't even have the luxury of choosing a fence to sit upon.
But it's not because the media is managing the real estate market.
A host of conditions has put the real estate market in a tailspin of rising inventories, falling prices, slow sales and foreclosures -- and the rest of the economy is beginning to take it on the chin.
In the same Business Week story, the publication included comments on Countrywide Financial's second quarter profit declines (down nearly one third from a year ago) and, repeating widely reported comments, wrote: "Countrywide Chief Executive Angelo Mozilo said the company's results were hurt by continued weakness in the housing market, specifically softening home prices, which could take until 2009 to recover. 'This is a huge battleship and it is turning in the wrong direction. It's going to take 2007 to get this thing slowing down, 2008 to get it to stop, and 2009 to head in the other direction.' "
Unsold inventories are rising because investors bailed out like they bailed out of the tech market when it went south. Along with fence sitters, investors and others are afraid if they go to market now, should they have to sell too soon, they'll lose the farm.
"Buying low-selling high" is a time-honored investment strategy every investor from novices to Warren Buffet follows, provided there's a "selling-high" on the not-too-distant horizon.
Investors and fence-sitters are also warily watching foreclosure victims squirming to get the bailout refinancing they need to float the same loan they landed several years ago. That Easy Street of good intentions paved in poorly underwritten mortgages turned out to be a real dead end.
Likewise, cash-poor or credit-weak first-timers looking for loan leverage couldn't drive off the cliff if they wanted to.
Wells Fargo, the nation's second-largest mortgage lender, recently shut the doors on sub-prime loan processing and funding for third-party mortgage brokers. That comes on the heels of scores of other mortgage lenders that have either shuttered shops or curtailed writing riskier loans by upping the underwriting ante.
The resultant oversupply of housing-without-financing is giving housing-related stocks a real thrashing. The publicly traded housing sector is the worst performing Wall Street industry thus far this year, losing an average 31 percent of value, followed by savings and loans, down nearly 14 percent this year, thanks largely to the messy mortgage market, according to Morningstar.
Once rising levels of homeownership has hit a wall and economic spillover is spreading to related stocks. Regional banks, REITs, the home supply industry and property insurance are all among the Top 10 Wall Street losers this year even as the Standard and Poor's 500 has enjoyed more than an 8 percent increase, Morningstar reports.
Imagine that? Property insurance making less money from one year to the next.
And many subprime backed securities have been downgraded to the curb.
Something's amiss in the housing market, but it isn't the media.
Some market woes, including homeownership failures, are also due to over-inflated home values pressured up by the strategy of under pricing listings to drive up bids, appraiser collusion, insider corruption and crime so rampant the Federal Bureau of Investigations is on the case.
Housing industry ills have been so severe, other federal enforcers -- this time from the monetary regulation branches -- have stepped in to increase consumer protections on several classes of loans used to prey on home owners and buyers, including home equity loans, nontraditional mortgages and subprime loans. States have followed in federal regulatory footsteps.
While perhaps, only a bad-apple minority in the real estate industry is to blame, none of it was instigated by the media.
The media doesn't create real estate cycles, it doesn't regulate the industry, appraise properties, underwrite mortgages, list homes for sale, insure them or fix them up.
The traditional journalism media is, in part, a watchdog. It's job is to report no matter how much those covered in the media whine, rattle cages and crack whips to bind and blind.
The media is supposed to offer fair, unbiased and balanced coverage designed not to placate those covered, but to imbue the reading public with objective information it can use to make its own decisions.
It's not a perfect system, but there has been no documented evidence that the media has been collapsing economic sectors.
Perhaps quite the opposite.
When the market was booming, the media reported as much and as long ago as 1990's first predatory loan law in North Carolina raised questions about predatory lending and the proper place for subprime loans.
Now the market is not booming, and in some places it's tanking, virtually crashing.
That's the story. The media is sticking to it.
However, along with the doom and gloom of how we got here and where we are going the media is also reporting about the positive choices that remain, including smaller boom markets and how to cope with market reality.
The key to remember is, just as the media reported the boom wasn't without a potential for disaster, the media is now reporting the bust isn't the end of the world.
The inference in Kunz's quote is to either 1) censor the news or 2) the news is bogus. Both are strong indicators of denial.
First, media censorship, or gag orders, in all but very specific cases, is unconstitutional.
And the traditional, professional media, is no more bogus now than it was nearly 20 years ago when it first warned of risky loans and the potential for market ruin.
Blaming the media now appears contradictory. There was no media "blame" when the market was booming. If the media can cause and sustain busts, why can it manufacture booms?
If the media should shoulder any responsibility, it's for not covering the real estate market with much greater scrutiny at all times.
Given some of the Paris Hiltons and Lindsay Lohans that show up in the press ad nauseum, it's easy to overlook the media's real calling -- to report on what has the greatest impact on the greatest number of people.
That's the news.
The media should be all over the housing market story like a roof on a house, not shirking in fear of being demonized.
Buying a home is the most expensive, valuable, emotionally trying and contractually involved purchase most people will ever attempt.
Home buyers and owners have a right to know what could impact that acquisition, and according to the National Association of Home Builders' own survey, consumers themselves say it ain't the media to blame.
They are however, right now, pretty incredulous about mortgage pitches and they find little value in outdated mortgage disclosures.
Those are the facts reported, but not generated, by the media.
The media no more switched on the housing market's current Blue Light Special than it caused home prices to shoot the moon.
Market factors are responsible and those responsible for market factors need to start taking responsibility.
Reputations are at stake.
