Changing the Conversation about the Market

I think everyone realizes, although it's disappointing, that bad news travels faster than the good. It simply takes more effort to spread good news.

While I'm not sure whether to blame the media for spreading the bad news, or the public for being eager to buy more bad news, the fact remains that our industry needs to work very hard to enter and change the conversation that's occurring about the real estate market. Below is a graph from Google Trends that shows the activity of the words "new homes" through the Google platform.

The top half shows a steady decline of the number of instances that users searched for "new homes" using the Google gateway. The lower graph shows the frequency that the words "new homes" appeared in news stories.

Google is, by far, the largest provider of search on the Internet, so the declining trend of people searching for "new homes" is a broad, but powerful market metric. I found it interesting that there seems to be a direct correlation between a declining interest in new homes and an increasing number of news stories about new homes. So as the market has worsened, more news is written about it.

It is the builders', salespersons', and the rest of the industry's responsibility to change this conversation. We need to remind the home shopper that real estate is inherently local and the "the market," as it applies to a home's value, may be an area a couple blocks square.

It's nearly impossible to change the tone of the conversation in the broad sense alone, but you can change shoppers' opinions one sales center as a time. Despite what they may have heard on TV, the Internet, or in the newspaper, your sales center is a market all by itself. Be sure to share how active your real estate market is and how they can be a part of its success.