I wrote yesterday's post complaining about local buyers being influenced by articles originating in other parts of the country. Today's San Jose Mercury's front page story featured screaming headlines: "Housing Plunge, Valley's Median price dives to 4-year low. Sales fall too." this was accompanied by a big color sketch of houses for sale, with their roof lines converted to a downward sliding graph. Of course, the small print in the rest of the article covered the truths that the headlines neglected to mention: that there were segments of the county that were not declining in value, such as Los Altos, Cupertino, Saratoga, etc., and that the median price drop was mostly caused by the increase of lower priced homes in the $500,000 and under range. What good does a statement several paragraphs down that reads, "There is no need for general panic," and an admission that "Median price figures do a poor job of telling individual homeowners how their property values are faring," do, when headline readers are already in a state of panic?
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