The Ombudsman at the Miami Herald, Edward Schumacher-Matos, has taken a look at the real estate reporting coming out of paper and gives it a passing grade. The amazing swings that comprise South Florida real estate are always difficult to report and the stakeholders in a boom and bust economy will always gripe when the news is bad for their side.
Trying to sell condo’s when the local paper writes daily about the lousy condo market will drive even the sanest person crazy. But the advice he gives is solid and something that I am going to try to incorporate here. Instead of having articles in silo’s where one day you are covering the negative perspective and the next the positive, try to put them together so that readers understand their are differing opinions on where the market is going, and how it got there.
A lesson we could all learn from.
The challenge is to write about dry matters such as mortgages, zoning and occupancy rates in an interesting, enterprising way — every day. You won’t find two more opposing views on the South Florida housing market than those of two of the leading analysts, Jack McCabe, of McCabe Research and Consulting, and Michael Y. Cannon, Executive Director of Integra Realty Resources/Miami.
McCabe is the pessimist and Cannon the optimist, but both agree that Herald reporting has been accurate and good. Their beef is with each other, and with opposing sources of statistics, such as the more upbeat National and Florida Association of Realtors and the downbeat Standard & Poor’s/Case Shiller index.
Readers, for example, could gauge the two and their views for themselves when The Miami Herald had them face off in a cover story for the Business Monday section in October. In a more-recent front-page story three weeks ago, Home Prices up, down, depending on source, Herald reporters took an intelligent first cut at how different indexes measure different things. via MiamiHerald.com.
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