The Kansas City Star is overlooking an important industry in its business coverage: residential real estate. I see coverage from time to time regarding commercial developments, but what about residential real estate?

I’m from Kansas City and grew up reading The Kansas City Star. I majored in journalism and worked as a newspaper reporter for five years before getting enticed by the world of public relations. I lived in Phoenix, Arizona where – as you can imagine – residential real estate news makes the front page on a weekly basis.

As a full time working professional, I read the business section with particular interest, but I’m dissatisfied by the constant corporate coverage. I would assume that there is only a small percentage of your readers who are interested in daily business news concerning labor, banking, telecommunications, agribusiness, technology and legal industries, but that most of these readers are homeowners.

A common topic of interest seems to be residential real estate – whether you own your own business, just moved to town, have lived in the same home for 50 years or are unemployed. It’s the one topic that is of common interest across all industries and reader demographics. (Now, to be fair, I have to confess that I have a real estate company as a client, so I’m especially in tuned with this coverage.)

And, I’m not talking about the New Home section. I understand that this special advertising section. Nor, am I talking about Sunday’s House & Home section, which is a feature section about home decorating and home styles. What I think is missing is the business news coverage of real estate.

At all times residential real estate should be a big story, but there’s no more important time than now with the recent mortgage crisis leading to many of our ecomonic problems. In fact, it’s common for many big daily newspapers, such as The Arizona Republic and the Las Vegas Sun do full section special reports annually on residential real estate.

As far as I can tell, there is not a reporter assigned to cover residential real estate – The Star and of course with the recent layoffs I highly doubt they’ll be doing any hiring. This has been an issue I’ve discussed with the Star’s editors for many years.

General story topics that are of interest to the typical reader might be: 

•  Where are the city’s best home values? Are new and resale homes in the outskirts of the city (Gardner, Smithville, Blue Springs, Lee’s Summit) still listing at good prices?

•  Which cities offer tax rebates for homeowners? I know Bonner Springs does, do others? How is it working?

•  Lake homes, such as Lake Quivira and Lake Lotawana have varied home prices. I know the homes are expensive on the lakes, but they also vary greatly from one house to the next. For example, a $180,000 homes sit next door to $600,000 homes. And, the land of these homes usually makes up about 50 percent of the home’s value – not a typical percentage for most homes.

•  Where are new KC residents drawn? I just talked to a woman and her husband who moved here from California and only looked on the Plaza and Mission Hills. I was surprised.

•  Are families moving to Kansas City, Missouri despite the bad reputation of the school districts? I hear they are, which in turn is improving the districts.

•  Luxury homes sit on the market for months because of the low demand in this area. How do Realtors market these high priced homes?

•  Where are homebuyers bidding for homes and ultimately offering more for the home than the asking value – and is this still happening anywhere now that market is down? How do you handle this situation as a buyer or as a seller?

•  Kansas City, Kansas development is a big story and will continue to be one. What about the homes over there? Bonner, Basehor, Edwardsville are platting land as fast as they can to prepare for the demand of homeowners – with most of these cities planning to double in size in the coming years.

•  Many real estate agents specialize in HUD foreclosures and are selling most of these properties to investors – either people wanted to fix up the home to sell or use it as a rental property. How does this business work? Who can bid on these auctions? Can you get a good deal?

•  Renovations that pay – What can the average homeowner do to their home to increase its value? Do local remodeling companies have appraisal information to share with customers?

•  Homeownership as an investment. I just met a young couple who bought a home in Waldo two years ago for $130,000. They just had it reappraised this year for $170,000 so they could get a home equity loan to remodel the kitchen. But, with the recent mortgage news, they’re tentative.

•  Rural living in Smithville area is getting more popular. A new development is under construction featuring two-acre lots priced up to $110,000.

•  Who is using the federal tax credits available to buyers? Do agents know how to market those to buyers struggling to come up with the money?

Anyway, you get the idea… And, I have many more story ideas where these came from.

I enjoy reading The Kansas City Star and will continue to do so, but I’m shocked that for the past five years that I’ve lived here, I think I can count on both hands the number of locally written residential real estate stories. I hope one day they will wake up and smell the coffee.