VEGAS INC Coverage
Buck Wargo
You’re doing a disservice to your readers, the caller tells me.
I’m confused at first because the reader references a survey I wrote about that stated Nevada real estate agents predict prices will decline over the next six months. It’s not about that, the caller says. It’s about how I’ve quoted local housing analysts who were wrong about the housing market’s price decline of more than 60 percent. He singled out SalesTraq President Larry Murphy and Steve Bottfeld, executive vice president of Marketing Solutions. I’ve heard the complaints whenever I quote Murphy, Bottfeld or Dennis Smith, the president of Home Builders Research.
Readers have a right to voice their opinions about what I write, and since my real estate coverage remains an issue to some, I thought it would be appropriate to discuss it.
The criticism began July 2006 when I took over as real estate reporter for In Business Las Vegas, the former incarnation of VEGAS INC.
Initially, the complaints about my reporting came from Realtors, housing executives and others because, according to them, I was being overly negative when the Las Vegas housing market was booming.
The price of new and existing homes peaked in June 2006 and sales remained near record levels. In September 2006, I was writing about builders dropping options to buy land. I followed that up with an interview with housing executives in town for a national conference about how bleak the homebuilding industry will be for the next several years.
At a time when foreclosures, adjustable-rate mortgages and home-loan fraud weren’t even on the national radar, I wrote two stories in October 2006 about how fraud contributed to the run-up in the Las Vegas housing market and how Las Vegas was going to see an onslaught of foreclosures that would prompt a decline in price as lenders seek to sell homes at a discount.
Foreclosures weren’t a problem at the time and default notices were just starting to trickle to the surface, but some readers weren’t happy.
In essence, many of those readers felt I was doing a disservice by raising alarms about repossessions that had yet to happen.
It didn’t get much better in December 2006 when I wrote my 2007 preview saying the housing outlook was grim because of foreclosures. I mentioned national analysts predicting large double-digit price declines in South Nevada and quoted Richard Lee, first vice president of First American Title, saying home prices would fall at least 15 percent in 2007.
I sought out Lee because I wanted a local analyst to say that as well, and he was the only one willing to do it. After the article came out, Lee told me he took a lot of grief about being too negative.
In early 2007, I wrote several stories about foreclosures and predictions of major price declines, including some national analysts saying it would be 30 to 40 percent over time. Prices didn’t start dropping in large measure until 2008.
That’s not the 60 percent that ultimately happened in the Great Recession, but at least people who were thinking of buying and selling had an idea of what might happen.
Sure, I covered conferences where analysts made predictions that the housing market was going to improve. And, yes, I quoted Murphy, Bottfeld and others who were overly optimistic and denied a housing bubble even existed.
Since Murphy, Bottfeld and Smith are the only Las Vegas analysts to produce monthly housing stats, they’re going to be quoted when they release their stats. But in larger-picture trend stories, I quoted others who’ve said just the opposite.
The problem is readers don’t see everything you write. Part of that is that In Business Las Vegas articles, unlike today, didn’t appear on the Las Vegas Sun website and seldom made it into the sister publication, the Las Vegas Sun, through 2008.
Only readers of the print version of In Business Las Vegas would have known the full picture I covered about the housing market.
So when someone calls me today and says I did a disservice to the reader, it makes me think back to when people were saying the same thing about how overly negative my coverage was.
I covered the housing market exactly the way the housing market should’ve been covered. I simply shed light on what was to come. I can only give readers accurate information and leave it to them to make decisions based on it.
I don’t think that’s a disservice. Quite the opposite, actually.