Real Estate Market not as bad as once thought?

For the past 12 months, it has been non-stop doom and gloom reporting on the real estate and mortgage markets.  Every time I turned on the TV, listened to the radio, opened a newspaper or started surfing online, it was another “the sky is falling” report on our national housing and mortgage markets.  While I agree we are in the middle of a market correction, it has been frustrating to watch the media moguls trying to out do each other in dramatizing the circumstances. 

Lately we have seen some reversals in both real estate and mortgage lending.  Markets that once were depreciating are leveling off and mortgage rates are still very low by historical standards.  People are buying homes and refinances are still happening.  Here in Eastern Idaho, including Pocatello, Blackfoot and Idaho Falls, we actually haven’t seen any depreciation.  It is true there are more houses on the market now than there have been in “the boom years”.  But this is now more of just a normal real estate market rather than a hot market.

I was watching a report on money.cnn.com that actually reported “housing’s rosy outlook”.  It talked about how real estate is local; meaning that, yes, there are some bad markets in the nations, such as Phoenix, AZ or Miami, FL.  However, there are many markets that are doing great.  Don’t trust everything you read or hear in the media.  Click here to watch the full report.  http://money.cnn.com/video/#/video/news/2008/05/19/news.harlow.coldwell.ceo.intv.cnnmoney

It was refreshing to see a national media report that was positive on our markets.  Since markets in general, including real estate markets, are driven by perception and feeling, perhaps we could see some of the markets that are depressed rebound quicker if more of our media friends would be just as enthusiasic reporting the positive rather than the negative.