What Business Journals Are For
Viewpoint by Richard Reisman
The difference in how business journals and daily newspapers cover business news was the topic of a March 13 keynote address I gave to the 18th annual Real Estate Conference put on by the Orange County Chap-ter of the Building Industry Association.
I illustrated the difference with a Feb. 4 Orange County Bus-iness Journal story by Daniel Williams detailing a big spike in new-home sales activity in January. I contrasted our story with one that ran later in February in the Orange County Register. The Register’s story told of how new home sales dipped in January.
Rhetorically, I asked whether one of us was just flat wrong or whether the apparently conflicting stories both could be right. It turns out both were.
For our story, the Business Journal talked with executives at The Irvine Company, Ladera Ranch, Coto de Caza as well as with major homebuilders and consultants.
“It’s been an awesome month. Homebuilders have returned in full force,” consultant John Burns said.
So why the contradiction with the Register story?
The Register’s piece wasn’t covering the homebuyers who showed up in droves at sales offices in January (and continue to do so). The paper’s story reflected homebuyers who showed up in smaller numbers in November and December and whose escrows closed in January.
The source of the Register’s story was DataQuick Information Systems, which tracks escrow closings. Our sources were the ones signing contracts that wouldn’t close until February.
I assured the homebuilders at the conference that they would read about the trend we detailed later on in the Register,and the Los Angeles Times too, for that matter.
Last Thursday, the Register provided data to substantiate what our sources had told us. New-home sales here surged 45% in February from January, reflecting the closing of sales activity we talked about in our Feb. 4 story.
Now don’t get me wrong. The Register is an excellent daily paper (as attested to by its triumphant battle against the Times). My point to the homebuilding industry is that we are different than the dailies. We are writing for a business audience, while the Register is writing for a general, mass audience.
Public deed filings offer easily trackable, comparable data that informs the community at large about the general state of the market. The Register does its job well.
Our reporting, on the other hand, is more useful to the business decision-maker who demands the timeliest information about the market’s direction to make the best decisions. That is our job, which I believe we do well, too.
Homebuilders are enjoying a great market right now. But the threat always looms that traffic in new housing developments could slow as interest rates creep up and prices go higher. It is our job to inform our readers when that takes place at the earliest possible moment. You can count on us to do that.
