While the front page of its website blares that it's a great time to buy a home, seemingly in contradiction to the endless stream of negative press about how housing is crashing whether it actually is or not, the National Association of Home Builders commissions a study to find out if the press indeed is behind buyers' reluctance to buy a new home.

The results are startling. Nearly one in five homebuyers (19 percent) said that they allowed the news media to influence their decision of when to buy a home. Nearly one in four (23 percent) said the news media had "some importance" on their decision; and 7 percent said it played a minor role. A full 48 percent said it had no influence whatsoever.

Whew. That's a good thing. If more than 20 percent of homebuyers took the news seriously, housing might have dropped a lot more this year than it did.

"While the majority of the households we polled indicated that they found the media a reliable source of information on the housing market, what they read in the newspaper, saw on television or heard on the radio was no substitute for actually going out and shopping the market," said Thomas Riehle, a partner in RT Strategies, which conducted the research for NAHB.

"When people are actually thinking about buying a home, they are driven by the details of how it will impact their family budget and lifestyle and contribute to their long-term wealth, and that gives them a much closer perspective on the market than what can be conveyed in news coverage," Riehle continued.

Well, that's where we part ways. If the media keeps saying that housing values are going down, obviously housing isn't going to be a great investment for some. Why should home buyers buy a new home? According to the NAHB's findings, one out of five home buyers would drop out of the market and another 23 percent would move to the sidelines.

Participants rated the importance of several factors that might affect their decision to buy or not to buy a home. Most (80 percent) cited home price as most significant, followed closely by the potential for the new home to appreciate in value (71 percent); the level of mortgage interest rates, (69 percent); and personal life changes, such as a new job or an addition to the family, (60 percent.)

On a list of eight items, news stories on real estate market conditions ranked second from the bottom, with 28 percent saying that it was an important factor behind their decision to buy.

It's the classic chicken or the egg story -- which came first -- doubts about home values or news stories doubting home values? Housing bubble stories began cropping up and Realty Times noticed a negative drumbeat and wrote about as early as 2002. By 2006, housing was in a "bust," despite only losing 1.7 percent in median values nationally. While some areas are receding, others are just picking up steam. Texas, for example, was passed over in the housing boom of the early aughts. Only this year, has Austin reached a new median home value of $175,000.

Sixty-one percent of the survey participants said that the media is "sometimes trustworthy" as a source of information on the housing market and 5 percent said that it is "always trustworthy." Twenty percent and 8 percent, respectively, said it is "seldom trustworthy" and "never trustworthy."

"The media provides an important service by giving consumers the big picture of what is occurring in the housing marketplace, even the big picture in their local markets," said NAHB President David Pressly, a home builder from Statesville, N.C. "But despite that, local reporting can't convey the information that consumers consider the most when they are looking for a new home."

"The fact is that even as the national market is slowing down from the unsustainable pace of the past few years, there are sizable numbers of families who need new homes. And with a wide selection of new homes to choose from, with mortgage rates remaining near historic lows and with incomes and jobs continuing to grow, the opportunities are extremely favorable for buyers in today's marketplace."

The NAHB says home builders are working down their existing inventory of homes fairly quickly and the current slowdown in production is expected by NAHB economists to have run its course by the middle of 2007. From that point forward, the industry is expecting to see a good balance in the marketplace between supply and demand, setting the stage for a healthy and sustainable trend for housing, supported by a growing U.S. economy.

It's a great time to buy . Get in while interest rates are down and inventories are up, says the NAHB.