Today, as we look up the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), we saw yet another blatant attempt at real estate spruiking. The offending article reported,
It’s a figure to break the hearts of first home buyers: Sydney’s median house price is inching towards $600,000 – almost double what it was a decade ago.
The subliminal message to prospective home buyers is clear: buy property now before it is too late.
The article reported that ‘wherever’ you look, the supply of housing is low and prices are going up. Then it picked a few locations here and there and sought the opinions of real estate agents (of all people) as examples to ‘prove’ that point.
Really? Is it really ‘wherever?’
If you read the comments below that article, one person wrote,
I just did a quick search on the Internet for properties available in Upper North shore Sydney and found over 200 in about 5 seconds. How this counts as a shortage I’m unsure… If there is a shortage wouldn’t it be hard to find a place?
Indeed, this is journalism on the cheap. Get a median (while conveniently leaving out the details and context), spin a story by taking the biased opinions of a few real estate agents located in a few places and then hope that readers will fall for the story through a mental pitfall called lazy induction.
We have one comment about the median. For those who are initiated, the median is obtained by lining up all the sale prices in ascending order and then pick the one right in the middle.
There are two facts about first home buyers:
- They tend to go for the lower end of the market.
- Since the first home-owner grant was phased out in 2010, first home-buyer activity declined significantly.
These two facts implies that sales are skewed towards the higher end of the market. That means the median figure will move upwards by definition. Conveniently, this basic analysis is omitted from the SMH article.
It’s bad enough to read cheap journalism. It’s worse to read cheap and biased journalism. We wouldn’t be surprised if the real estate industry is one of their biggest advertisers.
