And then the REIC-advertising-supported newspapers started laying off their staffs

What's gonna disappear first, having been disintermediated by the internet, discredited by their lies and distortion, and absolutely crushed by the housing crash...

Realtors or Newspapers?

Well, now we know why the MSM were such active cheerleaders of the housing bubble at the time - look no further than their REIC-driven and desperately needed ad revenues which have now gone kaput.

Now we just need to figure out why the f*cked up so bad on Iraq.

Paper scratches 40 jobs - Soft real estate market impacts ad revenue

A steep but cyclical decline in real estate advertising has forced The Bakersfield Californian to eliminate 40 positions, 10 of them through layoffs, company President and CEO Richard Beene announced Tuesday.

Between 2004 and 2006, The Californian enjoyed strong profits largely because of an "exploding real estate market," Beene said. But recently, real estate agents, home builders and others in the industry have scaled back their advertising, he said.

The real estate market is not expected to rebound until 2009 at the earliest, he said.

Warning: This article will totally bum you out - "Blood bath", "recession", "prices going lower", "there isn't a recovery"

A year and a half of doing HP, 3,000+ posts later, I think this is the ugliest article I've ever posted.

And the most spot-on. Hat-tip Richard for the link.

Get ready HP'ers. The days of spin, hype, cheerleading and "we've hit bottom" are over.

We've only just begun...

June 20 (Bloomberg) -- The worst is yet to come for the U.S. housing market.

The jump in 30-year mortgage rates by more than a half a percentage point to 6.74 percent in the past five weeks is putting a crimp on borrowers with the best credit just as a crackdown in subprime lending standards limits the pool of qualified buyers. The national median home price is poised for its first annual decline since the Great Depression, and the supply of unsold homes is at a record 4.2 million, the National Association of Realtors reported.

``It's a blood bath,'' said Mark Kiesel, executive vice president of Newport Beach, California-based Pacific Investment Management Co., the manager of $668 billion in bond funds. ``We're talking about a two- to three-year downturn that will take a whole host of characters with it, from job creation to consumer confidence. Eventually it will take the stock market and corporate profit.''

``It's not just a housing recession anymore, it looks more and more like an economic recession,'' said Nouriel Roubini, a Clinton administration Treasury Department director and economic adviser who now runs Roubini Global Economics in New York.

``There isn't a recovery about to happen,'' said Ara Hovnanian, chief executive officer of Hovnanian Enterprises Inc., the Red Bank, New Jersey-based homebuilder. The company's stock tumbled 42 percent this year through yesterday.

``When all these people see their mortgage payment and it's up 40 or 50 percent, they're going to say, `We can't stay in this house,''' Pimco's Kiesel said. ``And there are millions of people in this situation.''

Roubini predicts the decline in U.S. home sales will last at least another 12 months, reducing the median house price by 5 percent this year and next. That would take home prices back to 2004, when the national median was $195,200.

Some owners are selling their homes at ``fire sale'' prices to avoid foreclosure after seeing their adjustable mortgage rates spike, said Lawrence White, an economics professor at the Stern School of Business.

``Prices will continue to soften for as long as we have distressed sellers,'' White said. Some regions of the U.S. could see price declines of 10 percent in the next six to 12 months, he said