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 According to the National Association of Realtors 2006 Profile of Home Buyers & Sellers, historically 20 percent of homes purchased are new. In 2006, that figure rose to over 22 percent. While 78 percent of homebuyers purchased an existing home, is a trend developing that will make older homes more difficult to sell? That depends largely on what homebuyers say they want and what they are willing to settle for. New homes offer many advantages over older homes, particularly builder guarantees, up-to-date codes in plumbing and electrical wiring, and esthetics buyers want like open floorplans, tall ceilings, and other amenities not usually found in older homes. But newer homes are usually found in suburbs, and sprawl is taking new developments further and further away from central city cores.
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Brokers who participate in MLSs that withdraw MLS listing feeds from public portals such as Realtor.com will be able to provide direct feeds of their listings, says Allan Dalton, president and CEO of Realtor.com. "I have total understanding and respect for those brokers who want to go in that direction," says Dalton. But he also has some reservations. Broker-owned Northwest Multiple Listing Service serving greater Seattle recently announced that it would no longer be in the "marketing business" for brokers and is discontinuing its feed to Realtor.com, raising questions as to whether a trend is forming that more MLSs will exit the marketing business, leaving data feeds for brokers to pay third-party service providers to handle.
While the front page of its website blares that it"s a great time to buy a home, seemingly in contradiction to the endless stream of negative press about how housing is crashing whether it actually is or not, the National Association of Home Builders commissions a study to find out if the press indeed is behind buyers" reluctance to buy a new home. The results are startling. Nearly one in five homebuyers (19 percent) said that they allowed the news media to influence their decision of when to buy a home. Nearly one in four (23 percent) said the news media had "some importance" on their decision; and 7 percent said it played a minor role. A full 48 percent said it had no influence whatsoever. 
After scaring homeowners, buyers and sellers witless for the last three years, the financial press and stock analyst economists contributed mightily to the decline of housing in 2006, where homes have lost value recently for the first time since the National Association of Realtors began keeping records back in 1968. Now these same self-serving analysts, who would like to see day-trading home investors pour their money back into stocks, are saying the worst is over, according to a new Wall Street Journal Online survey. But is it too little, too late? In his piece for the WSJ online, "Is the Worst Over for the Housing Bust?" writer Phil Izzo clearly knows the value of loaded headlines.