7 Reasons To Avoid The Housing Listicle: Consumers Need To Breakup With Them

Listicles Are Often Junk And Don’t Reflect How We Should Think About Housing
Housing Market Content Has Been Gamified, Defying Our Loss In Mobility
Thirst For Better Quality Housing Information And Avoid Lists

In the effort to understand housing market behavior, consumers are forced to look at a lot of junk stats that don’t inform. Since access to housing data has ramped up dramatically over the past decade, more and more media outlets, hobbled by compressing profit margins, are pushing out silly content in their drive for more SEO hits. This content race has made the need to stand out from the crowd more important than ever. The end result has gamified housing market data through the use of listicles.

Confusing The Housing Market For The Stock Market

By 2005, home sales were peaking, but housing prices wouldn’t peak nationally until the summer of 2006. I remember in 2008 when stock market analyst Jim Cramer of Mad Money made the housing market bottom call of June 30, 2009. He was three years early, likely reflecting his stock market orientation since housing prices didn’ stop falling until 2012.

Years ago in a different universe, I was invited to appear on Fox & Friends circa 2005 to talk about the housing market just before the bubble burst.

Part of the process was sitting in the “hair & makeup” beehive of activity requesting they only make me look smart (my dad joke for every TV appearance). Every stylist there seemed to be plotting where they were going to buy several homes and how their friends and relatives were going to do the same thing. After they finished making me look smarter, I was taken to the set and sat on the couch on the viewers’ left-hand side of the television screen, and answered questions about U.S. locations where there was still a lot of sales activity. Frankly, it was very rattling to hear seemingly everyone connected with that show talk about the housing market like it was a stock – a highly liquid, fast-moving asset rather than a slow-moving, illiquid asset. The use of listicles today reminds me of that housing era.

What Is A Listicle?

The word is a combination of the words “list” and “article.

In journalism and blogging, a listicle is an article that is structured as a list, which is often fleshed out with additional text relating to each item.
Wikipedia

I became aware of listicles along with the sarcastic blogging term “snark” in 2005 when I began writing on my Matrix blog and during my time writing “Three Cents Worth” column for Curbed from 2004-2016. Here’s a listicle explainer: Eleventy Reasons Listicles Are Great.

Little did I realize I had been aware of the list writing style since 1985 with the launch of David Letterman’s Late Show Top Ten Lists. Here is the first in his Top Ten List series, including his explainer on the popularity of lists: Top Ten Words That Almost Rhyme With Peas.

But I digress…

Here are a few listicle examples I’ve seen recently:

Do homeowners or homebuyers think about their next home this way? These lists suggest consumers jump around the country all the time. The short answer: “no.” In fact, we have become less mobile as a country since the 1980s. I’m all for understanding how locations differ, but the overuse of listicles has become a distraction from the housing narrative which is probably why housing information has become such a spectator sport. Here are a few reasons consumers don’t bounce around as these listicles suggest:

A growing number of two-income households make moves more complicated
The consolidation of earnings/occupational opportunities across geographic areas
Technological advances that make migration unnecessary

To get into the listicle spirit, here are a few potential future listicle posts I’m working on for Housing Notes. One of the tricks of leveraging listicles is to use numbers that are not multiples of 5. They somehow come across as more authentic. Ha.

14 Reasons Why Left-Handed People Move To Apartments Without Air Conditioning
33 Examples Of Messy Houses In Listing Photos That Can Help Sell
7 Large Animals Not To Let Reside Inside Your Next Home

While consumers should break up with listicles, I can’t break up with my love for this 1981 pop-rock hit song, The Breakup Song, by Greg Kihn, who possessed all the coolness my college-age self could ever hope for and who sadly passed away last week.