Never mind the Mortgage Stress, here's the story
By
Michelle Boatley
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27/04/2010 6:00:00 AM
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1
comments
A headline in the Age trumpeting that First home owners are charging into the market and thus driving mortgage stress is certainly eye-catching. Read further however, and even though, as expected, Martin North is quoted in there, the story doesn't support the headline sound bite.
Shock horror! First home owners typically have a higher percentage of their house mortgaged than an established owner who has built up equity over a number of years.
Gasp! If interest rates go up, people will have to pay more.
Even gloomy Mr North is quoted as saying that the economy could handle another 2 or 3 percentage points rise without house prices falling off a cliff. So what was the point of the headline?
The point obviously was to get us to read the scary story. Which it wasn’t. But the problem is how many people actually read further than the headline as they flicked through the paper? And what effect could that have on borrowers? Unfortunately, as brokers, we will see many more such headlines that will not reflect reality – we just have to get on with the day to day business of helping clients while the media whip up a frenzy of booming prices or mortgage stress terror to sell newspapers.
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Pardon Me broker on
28 Apr 2010 01:33 PM
This type of reporting and lack of factual information influenced my decision to cancel home delivery of the age jst recently, at least on line you can discern waht is worth reading.