Newspaper, Bubble Blogs Feed the Real Estate Obsession

by Mark Glaser
November 29
200612:12PM

Have you ever gone to an open house even though you weren’t interested in buying the property? Have you ever pored over housing price data on Zillow or read through housing ads on Craigslist just for fun? You are not alone. There seems to be a growing obsession with real estate in the U.S., as home prices have soared in the past few years, only to come back to earth a bit in the past year.

But during that boom — and the current correction/bust — blogs of all stripes have sprung up to feed the need for instant real estate information, photos of noteworthy homes for sale, and the off-color stories related to city living. While some newspaper sites have had some recent success with real estate blogs, independent bloggers who have called the boom a speculative bubble — a.k.a. the bubble bloggers — have found a rabid audience for their bearish views.

“Bloggers have moved into bubble coverage because the media hasn’t done a very good job of covering the reality, and reporters are more conventional and look for the story of the hour and what the statistics are,” said Carol Lloyd, who writes the must-read Surreal Estate online column about the San Francisco Bay Area market. “And some of the statistics are produced by the NAR [National Association of Realtors], and they look like they’re just covering the industry for the industry.”

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