Here’s more click bait on the front page of the local paper, and most people won’t read any further – it’s too easy to decide to do nothing, which is fine. Wait as long as you want, and we will see where it goes.

It’s a great plan if you’re a buyer and don’t care much about what you are buying.  But if you are picky and want to wait until the headlines ease, then you can expect there will be others acting quicker than you, and probably with more horsepower.  The affluent aren’t as concerned about timing the exact bottom of the market when they just want a nice house.

Take my Aviara listing. It’s priced at 12% under the last model-match sale in June, and even the buyer of the comparable sale around the corner said mine was better than hers. In the story above, the San Diego County median price came down 6%, so I’m lower than that, and it’s got all the extras.

Yet, as I’m talking to open-house attendees, there was a steady flow of the usual soft stuff:

‘I don’t want to get into a bidding war’.

‘I want to wait-and-see where this goes’.

‘Prices are going down’.

Ok, no problem. But given what we’ve been through, you can’t expect that buying a quality home is going to get easier.  Even if the price was lower, there will be competition for the good buys – and when you think about it, there always has been in recent years. We had plenty of bidding wars and people paying over list prior to the pandemic – it isn’t a new thing.

Besides, if the market became so desolate that you could walk into an open house that you thought was a quality buy and nobody else wanted it, wouldn’t that scare you off too?

I have multiple offers on my listing and we’ll sell it for a decent price, so don’t worry about me.  I just want buyers to keep looking, and when you see something you like, don’t let the headlines written by ivory-tower guys talk you out of it.

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