Newspapers benefit from real estate bubble
According to this WSJ story (subscription required), newspapers are among the associated sectors that are handily benefiting from the real estate bubble thanks to a growing share of the shrinking offline classifieds market:
Real-estate ads accounted for about one-fourth of the $16.6 billion in classified-ad revenue collected by newspapers last year, according to the Newspaper Association of America. That represents a growing share of a shrinking market in general. Total classified-ad revenue was $19.6 billion in 2000, with real-estate ads making up 16%.
But online real-estate sites are steadily gaining a bigger slice of the business. Online sites captured an estimated 11% of the $12 billion real-estate ad market last year, according to the Realtors' association, with big players like Yahoo Inc. and Google Inc. making major moves into the segment. This year's online real-estate ad sales will total about $1.8 billion, or about 15.7% of the total, Borrell estimates. Most of these online ads are placed by real-estate brokers, not individual sellers, the Realtors' group says.