Luxury Real Estate

By Robert Lockard

RISMedia’s article entitled “Where the Truth about Today’s Market Really Lies” continues to interest me. It begs the question: Are media sources being fair in their coverage of the current U.S. real-estate market or are they being overly negative? To answer this question, I suggest that there is a stigma against covering positive stories in the news. I hope that this will not offend members of the press, but I really do think that negativity is far too rampant in the news.

Feature stories, or “soft news,” as they’re often called in the industry, are often where you find positive stories on good people, places and trends. But the real “hard news” is where you find all of the problems in the world. When I was a reporter, I noticed that “hard news” stories were almost always more coveted and interesting to my fellow reporters than “soft news” stories. I think that is part of the reason why we don’t hear more stories about positive and unchanged real-estate markets, though sometimes we do find them buried in an article.

It is perfectly fair to raise concerns about current real-estate markets because this can lead to positive changes. I would simply like to suggest that reporters should not just “dig deeper” into stories, but also broaden their search to include a variety of voices, positive and negative, in stories. Burying quotes on positive aspects of the industry beneath negative statements doesn’t count. I can empathize with the difficulty in getting both sides of a story because of time restraints and other pressures. But simply focusing on the negative side, because that is more popular or interesting than covering the positive side, isn’t fair to readers, viewers or listeners. I hope to receive some interesting challenges and comments from this post. Hopefully, we can change the way luxury real estate and other markets are being portrayed in the media.


Editor’s Note:
Robert Lockard is the Public Relations & Media Specialist with LuxuryRealEstate.com. I am Robert. I create all of Luxury Real Estate’s newsletters, write the editorials in LuxuryRealEstate.com Magazine and much more.

By Robert Lockard

Quick, guess which of these two stories you’re more likely to read in the news: A family that dutifully makes its mortgage payments each month or a family that misses several payments and is unable to keep its home. Let’s face it, conflict is inherently dramatic and interesting. It grabs our attention and inspires exciting emotions in us that we sometimes don’t experience in regular life. With this in mind, I’d like to talk a bit about an article in RISMedia, entitled “Where the Truth about Today’s Market Really Lies.” This article discusses the media’s current habit of reporting negative real-estate news while missing many positive stories.

Let’s remember not to blame reporters or make hasty complaints against them. I used to be a reporter, actually, so I can share some of what I learned about people in this profession with you. Reporters have a limited amount of time to research and write their stories, they usually contact previously established sources and they zealously guard their independence and neutrality on issues. Let’s be honest, though. Everyone has a bias and opinion on issues they’ve studied and many they know little about but pretend to be experts on.

I’m just getting warmed up on this issue. I’ll hopefully dig far deeper into this complex and extremely important topic soon. Here’s hoping for a strong luxury real estate market in 2008.


Editor’s Note:
Robert Lockard is the Public Relations & Media Specialist with LuxuryRealEstate.com. I am Robert. I create all of Luxury Real Estate’s newsletters, write the editorials in LuxuryRealEstate.com Magazine and much more.