Jan 29, 2023
The reality of statistics is that you can use them to tell any story you like. This reality impacts real estate consumers every day.
You can take any set of figures about house prices and use them to tell a positive story or a negative one, depending on your viewpoint.
Media, usually, will choose the negative option – and the people who feed press releases to journalists, seeking publicity for themselves, know that sensational negatives get more publicity than balanced analysis of property markets.
So the publicity seekers will place their focus on screaming negatives in their effort to lift their public profile – and the journalists of Australia will happily comply.
The mantra for media has always been: If it bleeds, it leads.
So when CoreLogic ran the numbers on price movements in the various locations across Australia in 2022, they found that roughly half had recorded price increases and half had price declines.
All the headlines around Australia screamed that half of locations in the nation had dropped – or, to use media parlance, they had plummeted, nosedived, collapsed or fallen off a cliff.
The headlines could, with equal validity, have shouted that half the nation’s locations actually recorded higher prices– which, given the tone of media coverage lately, is a remarkable outcome.