What do newspapers and real estate have in common?

Before I share my answer to that question, let’s consider what’s going on with newspapers these days – they’re falling apart from the inside out.  Yeah, we used to rely on the local paper for not only the scoop on our community’s happenings, gossip, and newsworthy blurbs (and at one point even for national and world news, if you can believe that).  But since then, the web has all but replaced print news.

Let me be clear – I still find some value in the local newspaper; it does make good kindling for my fireplace!  Actually, I keep up to date with my local happenings through a combination of the paper’s website and one of the local T.V. station’s news blogs.  Not only are they free, but they’re updated way more frequently than once a day with the previous day’s news.

I like this story shared the other day as part of a post on the topic by Jay over at The Phoenix Real Estate Guy Blog:

A couple of weeks ago a young man knocked on my door, selling subscriptions to the Republic. Here’s how the conversation went:

Sales Guy: I’ve got a *fantastic* deal on a subscription to the Arizona Republic for you!
Me: Is it free?

Sales Guy: Um no, but close!

Me: Sorry, not interested.

Sales Guy: You read it online, right?

Me: Yep.

Sales Guy: Yeah, me too.

So I gave him a bottle of water (it was pushing 100 that day) and off he went. Not before he told me that he hadn’t sold a single subscription. But he did get four cancellations.

That does a pretty good job at summing up my sentiments and clearly those of millions of former paper readers in the nation too.  What does this mean for the world of real estate?  I’ll let you figure that out – if newspaper advertising is still producing for those that use it, then more power to them.  But if I’d not already explored other more modern methods of marketing, I know I’d be investigating them really soon!

Oh and for my initial question – what do newspapers and real estate really have in common?  You could say they’re both declining, but I would expect real estate to improve soon enough.  Newspapers, uh… not so much.  So I suppose the answer to the question is “nothing really.”