The Impact of Local Media Pessimism on Residential Real Estate Markets

This study uses content analysis and a controlled experiment as data generation methods to investigate the precise nature of the largely unexplored relationship between the content of real estate news and activities in the real estate market. The theoretical base of the research is Kahneman’s two system view (2003) of cognitive processing, which is applied to an individual’s decision-making about the residential real estate market. The affect heuristic provides the theoretical basis for studying the relationship between the emotional content of local media information and decision making in the residential real estate market. The research question seeks to measure the “framing effect” of news on real estate market activity. It is posited that the way local real estate news is framed will influence transaction prices and the number of pending sales. A behavioral approach is utilized to understand the underlying relationship between a residential real estate market and a news article to audiences; an effect called frame setting. It is conjectured that when media coverage about the real estate market is negative there is more downward pressure on the market compared to when media coverage is more objective and includes descriptive statistics on the current real estate market