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You can't always believe what you read.
Newspapers get a lot of things right.
Sometimes, however, in an effort to share all of the available facts, the "relevance" factor gets left by the wayside.
This can be particularly true for real estate news.
Real estate is bought and sold in local real estate markets such as Loudoun County, Virginia; or Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
The press can't get that granular, though.
Instead, it reports real estate as "national news", lumping data from the 48 mainland states from Washington to Florida, along with Alaska and Hawaii, too, into one big sample set.
That may help economists and governments with a "big picture", but it does little for individual buyers and seller like you and me.
Real estate markets are not national. They're local. Other times, the papers miss the relevance factor in another way.
September's Housing Starts report provides an excellent illustration.
Wednesday, the government released its September Housing Starts report. It showed that Housing Starts rose 15 percent in September as compared to August 2011, tallying 658,000 units on a nationwide, seasonally-adjusted, annualized basis.
This is the highest monthly reading since April 2010 -- the last month of last year's home buyer tax credit.
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The surge in starts is a big story for the housing market and the press eagerly picked up the story. A sampling of newspaper headlines read :
And while these headlines are technically accurate, they're also somewhat misleading.
A deeper look at the September Housing Starts report shows that starts did surge last month but, if we remove the "5 or more units" grouping from the data, we're left with Single-Family Housing Starts data and Single-Family Housing Starts rose just 1.7 percent last month.
1.7% is a good number, but it's definitely not the same thing as 15%.
With its Housing Starts coverage, the press was only telling half of the story -- and not the half that matters to everyday buyers and seller.
Remember : As individual, we don't buy the condo buildings and apartment structures that make up the "5 or more units" category. By contrast, overwhelmingly, we buy single-family homes instead. Therefore, it's the Single-Family Housing Starts data for which we should watch monthly.
Thankfully, media tales work in both directions.
Accompanying the Housing Starts stories is coverage on Building Permits. The papers say permits dropped 5 percent last month, but that's inclusive, once again, of the 5-unit-or-more-units category.
Isolating for single-family homes, Building Permits were unchanged.
This is another strong signal for housing because, according to the Census Bureau, 82% of homes begin construction within 60 days of permit-issuance. We should, therefore, expect a steady housing market to close out 2011.
When you're shopping for mortgage rates -- conforming, FHA, jumbo, or USDA -- getting the "full story" is the difference between shopping for real rates, or shopping for a fake. Get real rates and get them for free.
Dan Green (NMLS #227607) is an active loan officer with Waterstone Mortgage. Email Dan ator click to get a free, no-obligation rate quote.
You can also find Dan on Twitter and Google+.
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