Housing heads up

This week and next are heavy with residential housing reports, so if you haven’t done a home-price story lately, it’s a good time fire one up.

The key to avoid confounding yourself and readers is to use the data consistently, because a number of home price indices are released in rapid succession toward the end of each month.

On Tuesday, the Federal Housing Finance Agency monthly house price index is expected; this one is based on transactions underwritten by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and will reflect July prices. The FHFA site also offers downloadable data and a home-value calculator you may wish to offer as a link to readers.

And on Friday the U.S. Census Bureau’s new home sales report, which also includes price information, will be released to reflect August Data. That follows the existing home sales report by the National Association of Realtors, which comes out Thursday.

The Standard & Poor’s/ Case-Schiller Home Price Index, a somewhat broader measure, will be issued on Sept. 29.

Confused? You’re not alone. A caveat to working with this type of data is to look at the overall trends, not obsess over the absolute percentage gains and losses. Use the numbers to portray a general sense of where you local market is heading, but dig for anecdotes, specific dollar figures from actual home buyers, and other up-to-the-minute detail for your narrative.

This Bankrate.com article, meanwhile, is a helpful primer on the methodology behind the various home price indices along with caveats and tips.

And this Marketwatch.com piece from last week is a succinct roundup of the challenges some analysts think will depress home prices for years to come. Note the color-coded map depicting how long each state is expected to languish before a rebound; according to it, my territory won’t recover until 2023.

Break down a similar graphic for the cities, counties and neighborhoods in your region and readers will stampede to read it, clip it and clamp it to their refrigerators. In fact, you’ll just about be guaranteed “most e-mailed” status in the newsroom the day it runs.

If Moody’s Economy.com can’t provide to you the same level of detail it gave Marketwatch, perhaps your local Federal Reserve bank, a real estate economist at a local bank or an expert at the regional multi-listing service would give it a shot.

Come back to Your Daily Tipsheet each morning for advice on where to find sources, background and creative ways to make financial news and trends relevant to your audience.

Hark the holiday shoppers ring

The calendar still says "summer," but on many store shelves, it’s already Halloween, with Santa in hot pursuit.

Nothing new in that – except that it’s your job to make it fresh and interesting.
This year, that won’t be difficult, with analysts anxiously seeking signs of recovery in consumer spending. Speaking of which, tomorrow be on the lookout for both the ICSC/Goldman Sachs weekly chain-store report and the Census Bureau’s monthly take on retail sales.

Keep those sites handy for context as you craft seasonal stories.

With retail results lackluster so far this year, merchants need to squeeze all they can out of these last few months. You’ll want to focus on the type and timing of promotional efforts, inventory strategies and other tactics that shoppers will notice.

Planning is key to effective business features. Don’t wait until the week before Thanksgiving to develop your sources; anyone connected to the shopping scene is too busy then. Now is the time to get to know managers, corporate PR staff, clerks and analysts.

Let your creativity flow. Once I worked for a business editor who cleverly convened a retail roundtable in early fall. We hosted six or eight area mall managers for coffee, pastries and a free-flowing discussion of challenges, forecasts and trends -- everything from seasonal hiring to the year’s hot toys and fashion items. It produced excellent story ideas we wouldn’t otherwise have known about. It also gave us several hours to establish credibility with people who then were more willing to answer our calls.

We wrote a Q&A out of the meeting itself, with photos and mini-bios of the executives and the malls they managed. Imagine the interactive map you could do, with pull quotes, pop-up mall stats and more.

A hot topic for such a group this year: empty storefronts. Strip-shopping-center vacancies hit a 17-year-high, and malls were looking pretty grim too, according to this July report from Reuters. Ask operators and developers what they’re doing to make those empty spaces more festive and more profitable; in past years, I’ve seen everything from temporary seasonal stores (the Halloween ones already are moving in) to gift-wrap and hospitality centers to nonprofit fund-raisers and craft sellers.

Speaking of festive, Google around for the firms that do seasonal decorating at your local shopping malls; they’re also great sources of trend anecdotes.

Holiday hiring will be top of readers’ minds; this year, the supply of elves will likely exceed demand.

For all these stories, make your source list and check it twice -- and avoid last-minute shopping for experts.

Come back to Your Daily Tipsheet each morning for advice on where to find sources, background and creative ways to make financial news and trends relevant to your audience.

Durables can reveal signs of local recovery

OK, so no one’s ever dreamed about striding to a podium, awash in applause, to accept an award for a well-reported can’t-put-it-down durable goods order story. (Right?)

Still, for those of us fortunate enough to still have any manufacturers to cover, the U.S. Census Bureau’s monthly update – July numbers are due out Wednesday at 8:30 a.m. - is a good source of comparative data for layering into stories about local industry.

And even if your nearby factories have been idled or shuttered, your territory probably includes dealers or operators of farm equipment, appliances, furniture, MRI machines, computers, toys and TVs, to name a few.

Factories and their workers all are affected by demand for durables – defined as equipment intended to last for more than a couple of years. (By comparison, non-durables would encompass consumable items from toothpaste to blue jeans to plastic bags and gasoline.)

Each month the Census Bureau releases its M3 report, formally known as Manufacturers’ Shipments, Inventories and Orders.

The M3 is considered a harbinger of industrial activity, can move the market and a sustained uptick would be seen as a light at the end of our recessionary tunnel. Analysts were pleasantly surprised by June’s numbers, which showed an unexpected 1.1 percent increase in orders, excluding aircraft and automobiles.

Since cars and planes are the biggies and tend to last the longest – there are probably DC-9s soaring around out there older than you! – orders for those items can skew a report and hence are generally stripped out of the numbers analysts use to get a true picture of manufacturing momentum.

Read down into the durable goods press release for information about specific products and sectors which may springboard ideas for coverage in your area. Home builders, defense contractors, retailers – they’ll all be eyeing the report and can give you their take on what it bodes for local business recovery.

Academic economists also will have their take on the report.

Transport firms – trucks, railroads and air freight coordinators – must be in your vicinity and can you give you the haulers-eye view of what’s moving. And of course, somebody’s got to finance all that hardware – talk to lenders and retailers about the business and consumer credit situation going into the fourth quarter.

Durable goods may not sound too sexy but they pay a lot of bills and sustain a lot of jobs. Illustrating the connection from the M3 to your readers is a challenge but one worth taking on.

Come back to Your Daily Tipsheet each morning for advice on where to find sources, background and creative ways to make financial news and trends relevant to your audience.

Store Wars and School Days

“Hit the books in great looks.” “Schooled in style.” “Retool for school.”

Those hip quips and many more from this week’s sales circulars really mean one thing: “Please buy our stuff!” The nation’s merchants, hobbled by the new cautious consumerism, are making a desperate last stand before Labor Day.

It’s hard to blame them. Back-to-school is our second busiest shopping season next to Christmas – meaning it’s retailers second-last chance to pull 2009 out of the red. Chain store sales were off 5 percent in July, reports the International Council of Shopping Centers, on track with similar drops earlier in the year.

Take a look at this recent tipsheet for links to major sources of retailing data – organizations you should bookmark and get to know.

Tomorrow and Thursday, key retailers report second-quarter earnings, including Macy’s, Nordstrom, Kohl’s, J.C. Penney and Wal-Mart. If any of those companies have a major presence in your market, you’ll want to pull the press release and keep it handy. One thing to note: Wal-Mart, as both the largest U.S. retailer and the dominant discounter, is considered by many analysts to be a major bellwether of consumer spending – representing as much as 15 percent of U.S. retail sales.

With that sort of clout, the quarterly results coming out of Wal-Mart’s Bentonville, Ark. headquarters can and do move the stock market. In fact, last May Wal-Mart – also the world’s largest private employer, by the way -- stopped reporting its monthly store sales, in an effort to calm volatility.

Obviously, no retailer’s second-quarter results will reflect back-to-school sales – at least until that probably-not-distant day when stores start those campaigns before the previous term is even out, the way Christmas merchandise now crowds beach balls and sand pails. But the Commerce Dept. on Thursday will release its take on July retail sales; check it out at 8:30 a.m. sharp. Here’s a link to the June release so you can scope the format; it’s interesting because it breaks down the results by category such as clothing, electronics, health and personal care (drug stores) and so on.

Meanwhile do peruse the sales fliers to hone your next back-to-school story idea. A consumer story about freebies and bargains would be a good draw; Kmart is offering free pencils while Office Depot counters with free Crayolas. Other special offers are out there; I see Michael’s has jumped on the teacher-appreciation bandwagon launched by Staples and is offering an extra discount for classroom supplies.

Even hardware stores and other unlikely chains are getting into the act with specials on storage tubs, vitamins – no stretch is too great to capture the school-kids dollar. Many states just held their sales-tax-free weekend; others are yet to come. Check out this list and do a port-mortem or a preview.

Home in on one specific angle – cost of sports supplies, the contentious “school supply lists” that elementary teachers issue and other back-to-school issues that affect a specific slice of your readership. A few years ago one of my Detroit News colleagues wrote about “the cost of a high school senior,” – from photos to prom to college application fees, the senior sticker shock made for an excellent read.

Come back to Your Daily Tipsheet each morning for advice on where to find sources, background and creative ways to make financial news and trends relevant to your audience.

Back-to-School Biz Basics

Many of us have yet to gnaw an ear from this year’s corn crop or break out our bathing suits. But in the retail world, it’s September in July. National merchants used to wait until August to toll the school bells. This year, sales fliers and Web sites already tout backpacks, notebooks and dormitory décor.

And no wonder. Aside from a chance to rebound from dismal year-to-date sales, which continued to slide in June with a 5.1 percent drop compared to 2008, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers, back-to-school merchandising is the second-largest piece of the annual purchasing pie, according to this research data from the National Retail Federation.(And by the way, if you haven’t signed up for news feeds from the ICSC and the NRF, I recommend it. And while you’re at it, follow BigResearch on Twitter for a steady stream of consumer behavior updates. )

Outfitting the nation’s 76 million students with everything from books to backpacks to BlackBerries is a $51 billion business – bigger than Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Halloween and Father’s Day combined. The only more crucial period for stores is our annual $445 billion “winter holiday” spree. And where back-to-school once meant a new pencil box and shiny shoes, all sorts of retail chains are in on the act now. And their marketing methods are more interactive, aggressive and innovative than ever, which is a story angle in itself.

Staples, the office-supply purveyor, has declared July 15 the “official” kick-off to school shopping complete with a list of must-have items. Bed, Bath & Beyond’s home page is devoted to dormitory chic, along with a MasterCard-sponsored $55,000 scholarship sweepstakes. The housewares retailer is actually soliciting dorm-room inventions from students via edisonnation.com and charging a $25 fee for entries!

TAF, formerly the Athlete’s Foot shoe store, already is offering a free sports bag with $50 purchase. And Office Depot is aiming a special merchandising effort at teachers, with its Star Teacher discount program and teacher-appreciation breakfasts at selected stores in July and August.

Previously, Wal-Mart has tried a Facebook page aimed at college-bound pupils, so keep an eye on social media sites for more offbeat marketing approaches. And read the next few weekends’ sales circulars thoroughly; they’re great source of trend and “what’s hot” stories.

By the way, if you’re wondering where I got that 76-million-student statistic above – the U.S. Census Bureau publishes intriguing fact sheets on a variety of events including this one on back-to-school shopping. It features factoids ranging from enrollment in various demographics to the number of stores in categories ranging from kids’ clothing to books. All are helpful tidbits that add texture and interest to your seasonal stories.

We’ll revisit back-to-school shopping between now and Labor Day, but make sure you don’t wait until summer’s end to add this all-important consumer-spending season to your radar screen.

Come back to Your Daily Tipsheet each morning for advice on where to find sources, background and creative ways to make financial news and trends relevant to your audience.