Blaming the bankers
It’s a tough time to be in real estate, especially the business of selling homes.
But here’s one thing real estate folks can give thanks for. While the housing market is a mess, the Joe the Plumbers of the world are blaming the bankers, not their local real estate agents.
Bankers now find themselves one of the public’s favorite targets after the meltdown on Wall Street, according to a new Gallup poll. Nor can I imagine the sudden clampdown on credit – and the mountain of rejection letters sent out to would-be borrowers of car and home loans - is helping the industry’s popularity either.
Bankers saw a decline in their positive ratings from 35 percent to 23 percent, according to the Gallup survey. That’s the slice of the public that believes bankers have high or very high ethical standards. It was also the only profession that saw such a dramatic drop in the annual survey by the public opinion firm.
For bankers, it’s an all-time low.
To put it into historical perspective, the last time bankers were viewed this unfavorably was twenty years ago during the savings-and-loan crisis. But even then bankers won positive ratings of 26 percent, compared to 23 percent today.
Not that real estate agents get off without a scratch. While the public’s view of real estate practitioners and their ethical standards has pretty much stayed the same over the past year, there’s not a lot to boast of here.While 57 percent of those polled by Gallup think real estate practitioners have “average ethics,’’ only 17 percent give them a positive rating for having high or very high ethical standards.
The news media can’t crow either, though.
Nearly half those surveyed, 44 percent, judged journalists to be just “average’’ on the integrity front. Another 31 percent believe journalists have low or very low ethical standards.
