Don't shoot the messenger by gimleteye

Many real estate brokers and financiers attribute the collapse of Miami’s residential real estate markets to sensational news reports.

In fact, the mainstream media is late to the after-party.

We would all have benefited from regular doses of scepticism from the Miami Herald during the run-up of residential units in the city and county far in excess of historic “absorption” rates for new construction.

This would have given legs to planning initiatives like Miami 21 before plan and permit approvals for a thousand condos set like concrete.

But that’s the condo market. In the struggling market for production family homes, or, sprawl-- the Miami Herald has been very quiet.

There are some simple reasons why.

Underlying ownership of condos is usually distributed to big financial investors.

Tract housing, with the exception of Lennar, is a home grown industry dependent on decisions at County Hall, not city hall.

County Hall exists for zoning and re-zoning so production home builders can plow more houses into green fields abutting the Everglades and Biscayne National Park.

The biggest law firms in South Florida—take Greenberg Traurig for instance—built their practices on these zoning changes, otherwise known as hard currency of political office in south Florida.

Top lawyers in this field are pals with Herald executives and always have been. It is an exclusive circle, reinforced by the advertising dollars in the real estate section of the newspaper.

We are not getting the stories we need from the mainstream media: how historic low interests rates, that pumped up the housing bubble, are running straight into the hard reality of a weak dollar, massive federal deficits and the trade imbalance.

In time the story will unfold and many of those real estate brokers now blaming mainstream media will be looking for new lines of work.

When that happens, don't shoot the messenger.