It's bad enough that a cratering housing market is leading to a slump in real estate advertising at newspapers, as a dreary series of earnings reports showed this week.
What's worse is that a lot of that advertising may never come back to newspapers even if the real estate sector recovers. That's because a significant chunk of those advertising dollars are moving - you guessed, online.
Exactly how much of a shift is occurring is difficult to measure in terms of dollars, but several real estate executives say they are making a conscious decision to move money out of newspapers and onto the Internet as that medium grows in importance as a tool for researching home-buying decisions.
