Most businesses provide products and services with the philosophy that you will be successful if you make your customers happy. News media is the exception: its business model is based on making money by causing fear and alarm.
It doesn’t much care whether its content is accurate and reasonable – as long as they’re startling people with negatively sensational clickbait, they will publish.
Nowhere is this more so than in coverage of the housing market. Anyone willing to claim that home values will collapse will be given publicity without any journalistic scrutiny. The person making the claim may have a poor record in forecasting, but media doesn’t care. The clickbait headline is the only thing that matters.
The latest screaming headlines suggest the RBA expects house prices to fall 20%. In reality, it doesn’t expect that at all – it’s a worst-case scenario based on a series of negative assumptions, but media has been happy to misrepresent the RBA report to achieve clickbait.
To be successful in real estate, you need to tune out all the media white noise, do real research and just get on with business.
