'How Are We Going to Stand Out?'

From the New York Times:

For newspapers, February was the cruelest month. So far. Revenue from advertising was in striking decline last month, compared with February a year ago, and were generally weaker than analysts had expected.
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"I’m reluctant to say that a single data point is a trend," said Barry Parr, a media analyst at Jupiter Research. "But those are scary numbers, especially when we’re not in a recession."
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The Tribune Company, whose papers include The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune and The Baltimore Sun, reported losses of more than 5 percent. So did McClatchy, whose papers include The Miami Herald, The Sacramento Bee and The Lexington Herald-Leader in Kentucky.
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In some cases, particularly in Florida and California, they traced the weaknesses to volatile real estate markets.
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Lauren Rich Fine, a media analyst for Merrill Lynch, cautioned in her analysis of McClatchy’s February numbers not to "overreact to just one month of poor performance." Nonetheless, she said, McClatchy’s problems were "just starting." She cited the stark comparison between California’s hot real estate market last February, when revenue from classified real estate ads was up 48 percent, and its weaker market this February, when that revenue was down 20 percent.

From the Sacramento Business Journal:

It's tougher for real estate agents to earn a buck this year; the days are gone when it was enough to stick a sign on the lawn and wait for offers. With sales volume and prices down, agents are having to dust off old marketing strategies and adopt some new, proactive ways of putting properties in front of prospective buyers.
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For agents and buyers, that means an increased reliance on the Internet... As with so many other categories of advertising, a post on Craigslist can come at the expense of a newspaper ad. "I tried this avenue because I wasn't getting results from newspaper advertising," said Cheryl Rouse, an agent with Keller Williams Realty in Sacramento who has started posting on Craigslist.
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[A]gents are having more conversations about what improvements the house needs to put it in show condition. "You've got 25 properties to compete with; how are we going to stand out? In this type of a market, that's what we are seeing more of," said Reneé Catricala, a Coldwell Banker agent in Sacramento.
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For agents who have been in the Sacramento market only long enough to see it during the hot years, the new realities might be confounding. One message that could be difficult to swallow is that the hot market was the aberration, not the recent, cooler one.