Lyon pulls ads, Rocklin housing loan sucks
From the Sacramento Business Journal
From the Central Valley Business TimesSacramento's Lyon Real Estate says it plans to significantly reduce advertising with THe Sacramento Bee, citing national statistics that four of every five homebuyers use the Internet in some way to find their homes.
Lyon's contract with the Bee is worth more than $1 million per year, Lyon chief executive officer Michael Lyon said.
A single bad loan to a housing developer in the Sacramento area is sucking most of the second quarter profits out of Capital Corp of the West (NASDAQ: CCOW) of Merced. The company says it had net income of $642,000 or 6 cents per diluted per share for the quarter ended June 30.
A year earlier, it had net income of $6,254,000 or 57 cents per diluted share. The slumping Central Valley housing industry is being blamed. The bank has had to set aside more than $3.7 million as a loan loss reserve and a provision for off-balance sheet items of $1.595 million.
It’s due to a previously disclosed $12.9 million residential construction project located in Rocklin that the bank foreclosed on July 25. The developer was not identified by the bank.
9 comments:
The question becomes, how does Lyon hope to reach online shoppers?
Average Buyer made the comment on her blog that she uses the Sac Bee so much that she felt she should buy a subscription, but the subscription price was higher than the WSJ and most of the news wasn't as newsworthy. I tend to agree. I use the online Bee a lot and haven't purchased a subscription for years.
OTOH, the Bee does put MLS online and real estate statistics.
I guess my fear is that if large advertisers start leaving the conventional print media, that could be a real problem. I've known for a long time that subscribers don't really pay for newspapers; advertisers do. That's good and bad. I don't want to pay for a bunch of propaganda and happy-talk, but I do want the statistics and the MLS to have a "free" venue.
If we turn it yet again, I suppose an argument could be made that if the subscribers WERE paying for the operating costs of the newspapers, we'd likely actually get news and commentary that helped US instead of mindless parroting of talking points, memes and corporate crapola.
I do use the Zip Realty site several times a day. They're only mildly annoying. Lyon could also hand out 50K per month to a random web site user (that's still way lower than their Sac Bee budget) so they can save for a down payment!
I don't blame Lyon - the Bee has gotten to a point where it almost doesn't care what it prints in terms of ads and effectiveness (of course thats "not their job")
The back page ad they run is hardly ledgible, their glossy magazine insert is pretty cool, but for over a mil a year, hmm.
Real estate needs pictures.
Oh and by the way, Sac Bee, quit shrinking my funnys!
Cmyst - Sac Bee uses data from www.metrolistmls.com and resorts as does zip, trullia, www.golyon.com, etc.
But Sacbee also publishes sales data that looks like its from the assessor, probabaly some other service. Like that stuff.
Another major lender up in smoke...
http://tinyurl.com/3d5j8m
Well, I was going to say that Metrolist MLS is a confusing site, but then I went there and it's easy as pie.
RIP, Sac Bee....
There's another one in Folsom that went down today.
While not related to Rocklin, per se, I think everyone should read James Kunstler's latest:
http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2007/07/vanishing-point.html
"It's really hard to account for the stunning failure of responsibility. What you had was a whole industry that surrendered the standards and norms that brought it into being and enabled it to function in the first place. Mortgage lenders stopped requiring house-buyers to qualify for loans; bankers stopped caring what stood behind the paper they issued; dubious loans were bundled and resold like barrels of rotten anchovies -- in such numbers that no individual stinking minnow would stand out -- and the barrels were traded up the line, leveraged, hedged, fudged, fobbed, and fiddled until, abracadabra, they were transformed into so many Tribeca lofts, Hampton villas, Piaget wristwatches, million-dollar birthday parties, and Gulfstream jets."
Whoops - here's the link.
So funny this topic should come up. I actually tried to call yesterday to subscribe to the Bee. Was so frustruated by my exeperience that I gave up. They only offer specials....in like 10 week increments. I hate shopping specials all the time. It sucks up time and energy (and I don't have much of either). This is precisely the reason WalMart so quicly eclipsed Kmart....you always know you are getting a good price at WalMart. Kmart may have good specials, but they make up the margin elsewhere.
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