A topic on the new media campaign, "How about a topic on the media blitz to sway public opinion in the new year? Is it really a good time to buy a house? What are the implications of in light of the recent report on subprime defaults?"

"'The National Association of Realtors is launching a $40 million advertising campaign to encourage Americans to buy houses amid the ongoing housing slump.' NAR President Pat Vredevoogd Combs said that now is a good time for consumers to buy a home, given low interest rates and high inventories. 'You can walk into a marketplace and have a choice what you buy,' Combs said.'"

One note ad revenues. "I wonder if they are buying higher media weight levels in the more troubled markets. They also have that evr present guerilla PR budget called 'we’ll pull our ad dollars from your outlet if we see any bad stories.' I’m sure they use the 'Good Time to Buy' ad budget as a carrot and a stick for the media. Publishers will be pressuring editors no doubt."

"By the way, $40 million is not a lot of money as national ad budgets go these days...unless you can use it to get an additional $40 million of friendly editorial reports from the MSM."

Another saw this problem. "I’m having a hard time understanding how realtors get away with 'calling' a major market. My understanding of a RE broker is that they are there to facilitate a (sometimes) complicated transaction and to advise accordingly."

"But when a RE broker advises buying, selling or taking something off the market there’s a problem; since they are intimately involved in 'their' market,) they could easily have a conflict of interest in the advice they provide, no?"

A reply, "Salesmen don’t have a conflict of interest. Their interest is quite clear: MAKE THE SALE. See? No conflict. People who listen to salesmen as if they are independent advisors with a fiduciary obligation will often end up in deep doodoo."

Another saw a risk in the media push. "At the end of the day, will the NAR’s propaganda campaign blunt or exacerbate the housing crash’s severity? One might argue that the risk of a hard landing can be reduced by 'managing' expectations to the positive."

"But if the expectations management campaign also features disinformation, in the form of either ignoring or fabricating statistics, the whole effort could blow up when credible contradictory evidence comes to light. The potential problem stems from expectations shock, the sudden realization by vast numbers of individuals that they have been collectively suckered and deceived by the NAR could be devastating."

The Globe and Mail. "I don't subscribe to the theory that because of a couple of benign recent U.S. housing statistics, there's going to be the fabled 'soft landing' and now is a good time to buy a house."

"Official statistics are so massaged and seasonally adjusted that I often find them hard to believe. It seems like only yesterday (Dec. 12, 2005, actually) that the NAR was predicting that the U.S. national median house price would rise about 6.1 per cent in 2006. After all, gushed NAR, over a full year, the national median price 'has never declined since good record keeping began in 1968.'"

"After the recent 'good' news about the U.S. housing market, the median price was still down about 2 per cent for the first 11 months of 2006. That makes that NAR forecast fairly embarrassing, but the market has discounted the actual small drop as a mere healthy correction, hardly the harbinger of an incipient downward cascade in house prices, or at least, not yet.

From CNN Money. "We hear lots of stories about the pain: An Indiana man writes to say he can't sell his house even asking less for it than he paid - four years ago. A Duluth, Minnesota, reader writes, 'The housing market is brutal, has been for months. Prices dropping at least $20,000, some as high as $60,000 just to get them sold. Most aren't selling even with the drop.'"

"A reader from northeastern Connecticut moved to Maine and can't find a buyer for his previous house even though all he's looking for is to sell for what he owes."

"A Gulf Breeze, Florida, reader reports, 'The market here went sky high and now went down - houses are selling cheap and people are not buying.'"

"Yet, when the NAR released its third quarter median sales prices, the downturn was very modest, just 1.2 percent compared with 12 months earlier. Why is there such disconnect between the numbers and reports from the front lines?"

"According to Janet Branton, VP of business specialties for NAR, the main factor is that many consumers, and a high percentage of real estate agents, the majority of whom have been in the industry less than five years - got used to operating in a bubble. 'Most agents and many sellers haven't seen a normal market,' Branton says."

"Another factor may be problems with the statistics themselves. Some of it is just not very accurate, according to Jonathan Miller, co-founder of Miller Samuels, a leading real estate appraiser based in Manhattan. For example: 'A significant portion of the OFHEO index,' he says, 'is based on refinanced mortgages, not [solely] on actual market transactions.'"

"Miller also believes that bad news travels much faster these days and comes down harder, causing people's perception to be more extreme. 'We seem to pile on the cheerleading when the market goes up and we pile on when the market falls,' he says. 'And we pass the word on faster through the blogosphere.'"

"Chief economist for the Mortgage Bankers Association, Doug Duncan, is not as sanguine about a swift recovery in the housing markets, by the way. He believes, based on past slowdowns that the slump will take until at least mid-2007 and likely late 2007, to work through. 'We have to work off the excess inventory before real estate returns to trend lines,' he says. That will take 24 to 30 months from the peak, which he has pinpointed as July 2005."

"Recovery might even take a little longer this time. 'The long run up may mean that the recovery takes a little longer,' he says."