CNBC Powerlunch Road Shows hit Hyde St Pier Friday and the Trouble with Newspaper Headlines

My favorite CNBC news anchor Bill Griffeth, made an in person appearance taping his segment of Power Lunch from the Hyde Street Pier in San Francisco last Friday where he interviewed our very own Sam Zuckerman from the Chronicle.

In the first few minutes Bill queried Sam about Friday’s front page headline from the business section of the Chronicle; Bay Area home sales plunge to 15-year low. When asked by Bill if it was an indication that we are feeling the same chill from the credit crunch as the rest of the country, Mr. Zuckerman goes onto report that according to the real estate agents* ‘it’s a tale of two markets, the suburbs are hurting – go into the core of San Francisco and Marin and prices are up’.

Now I, as do many of my colleges in the business, have a big problem with the media coverage on real estate in San Francisco. My primary problem is that it is misleading. Notice the sentence where it states ‘A total of 7,299 houses and condos changed hands in the nine counties of the San Francisco Bay Area last month, down 25 percent from 9,713.’

Kelly Zito pulled her information for the article directly from Data Quick’s Site and it is factually correct, but when thin slicing a headline and scanning the print most people are left with the impression prices are flat or down in San Francisco. The reality is the paper is quoting numbers on 9 vastly different markets merged together. When one reads a sentence that declares sales in the San Francisco Bay Area are down, written by the San Francisco Chronicle, one is left with a very different impression than if it read closer to the truth which is the Santa Clara Bay Area is down by 25% (on virtue of the fact that Santa Clara county has the most transactions recorded and thereby sets the median).

To see how this affects Jon Q. Public I defer to a recent email plea from a fellow agent who was looking for recent multiple offer stories to give to her client who absolutely did not believe that properties were still selling in multiple offers. Which is true in District 9 (Soma etc) where for the time being there is plenty of inventory to choose from, but decidedly untrue for most decently priced Single Family Homes and condos where there is limited supply: aka most of the rest of the city.