Spring into a real estate coverage plan

By Flickr user D'Arcy Norman

After a ghastly 2009, many stranded home sellers are pinning hopes on 2010 as the year we shake off residential gridlock.  Analysts aren’t so sure, as this Reuters piece from Monday illustrates.

Either way, home sales and prices will be among the top three or four financial stories of the next six months. And now, as we’re poised to enter the crucial spring selling season, is the time for you to plot your real estate coverage plan.  Be sure to stay abreast of recent trends, using data out this week including today’s Case-Schiller home price index, Wednesday’s new home sales report from the Census Bureau and Friday’s existing home sales report from the National Association of Realtors.

We’ll be sharing plenty of tips about covering home buying, selling and financing in months to come, but by doing a little set-up work now you’ll reap months worth of economic stories that combine hard data with texture and human interest, making them doubly valuable to readers.

Ponder some sort of longitudinal study or standing feature that will anchor your real estate coverage, give it continuity and keep the audience clicking back for more.  Some ideas:

Follow a handful of home sellers. Find three or five sellers in typical predicaments – empty nesters stuck in a larger-than-needed homestead, a for-sale-by-owner wannabe, a job-hunter poised to relocate, an underwater borrower or someone who bought into a promising development that’s turned stagnant and unattractive.

If you can obtain the cooperation of a handful of sellers – including full financial disclosure about their mortgage balance, asking price, selling costs and preferably their income and other debts – you can write a compelling set-up piece to run within the month.  Then, either through periodic interviews you conduct, or a blog on your news organization’s Web site that the sellers update, or preferably a combination of both, you can produce a multi-media soap opera illustrating the ups and downs of their sales efforts.  Just make sure you can update at least weekly on each subject, or the project will fizzle out.

This approach screams for photo galleries, video, reader polls (‘Should Anna Jones repaint her kitchen to attract more buyers?’) and graphics such as a historical timeline of each home’s selling price, taxable value, ownership changes and property taxes over the years.

Track sales in a specific neighborhood, street or subdivision. Similar to the above but more data-focused.  Use county property records to create a historical graphic for every residence in a selected microcosm, be it a street, a single subdivision or a well-defined neighborhood.

Aside from narrative about the chosen area, this approach cries for alternative storytelling in the form of a map – updated online as transactions occur – detailing the status of each property.  Aside from the metrics listed above, you’ll want to show whether it’s vacant or occupied, if taxes are paid-up or delinquent, if it’s in foreclosure, for sale or not.  If you can summarize the human elements behind each dwelling, so much the better, but I’d see this as more of a pure economic story showing the rise and fall of taxable and market value in a particular subset of your territory.

Your county clerk’s office is the place to start for data; many offer online satellite maps as well as assessment info; online availability of mortgage values varies.  Your local multiple-listing service may cooperate, too, in checking its records for historical prices.  One handy shortcut is the site of Nationwide Environmental Title Research; it’s a commercial site but has free pointers to county-level Web sites via an interactive map.

Follow the fate of real-estate agents. This may be a make-it-or-break-it season for Realtors and other real-estate related professionals.  The National Association of Realtors reports annual membership figures in this graphic, which shows a decline of nearly 250,000 since the good old days of 2006.  Check state licensure records for more local statistics, historical trends, disciplinary records and other data that will reflect industry fortunes.  (Also check into applications and how the real-estate-license schools are faring, if you have a chance.)

Commissioned agents, brokers and realtors are under increasing pressure from online alternatives, flat-fee agencies and an increasing inclination of motivated sellers to go it alone and save on commissions.  Couple that with a market not projected to rebound for years and depressed sales prices that curb commissions, and you’ve got a lot of salespeople trying to psych themselves up each day to perform an unenviable job.

If you can gain the candid cooperation of a few agents and show readers the market from their point of view – including how they deal with the foibles and expectations of buyers and sellers and how they make ends meet when sales are slim – you’ll come up with some useful, informative and readable narratives.  The obvious caveat here is that the subjects must be willing to lower their guard and reveal the downsides as well as the triumphs.  But going into Year Four of a gruesome home sales market, the facades are probably cracking anyway.