Old habits die hard. Take, for example, real estate news reporting. Last Tuesday, CNNMoney.com reported that nationally, “January home prices fell for the sixth month in a row, edging closer to a double dip.”

The report called the news “dismal” and included this hand-wringing quote from David M. Blitzer, a spokesman for S&P/Case-Shiller, which issues a home price index covering 20 major markets: “January brings us weakening home prices with no real hope in sight for the near future.”

Really? I wondered how that quote and the report would be greeted by the folks in Las Vegas, one of the nation’s worst housing markets. In Las Vegas, you see, they were just greeted by this news from DQNews.com, a respected real estate reporting enterprise: “Las Vegas region February home sales rose to a five-year high, boosted by unusually high levels of cash and investor purchases. The record portion of cash deals represented more than half of all transactions for the third consecutive month, while the percentage of homes bought with a mortgage dropped to the lowest point for any month in at least 17 years, a real estate information service reported.”

The habit here that has trouble dying is reporting housing news strictly in the context of month-over-month or year-over-year data, without sufficient context to help provide a

See SMITH, page C34