Over here near the right coast (direction-wise), we’re seeing some modicum of stability as well. Our market normally dips in April over March because Augusta is home to the Masters Golf Tournament, and that full week involves a mass exodus of residents (schools are on spring break that week), and a mass temporary migration of golf afficionados. This shuts down Buyer traffic, and many Sellers rent their homes out to visitors, golfers, caddies, or sports broadcast folks. This year – unexpectedly, we saw a small increase in April sales over March. Hopefully a sign we’re begining to inject some stability here in a market that is down over 40% on 2006 numbers.

I don’t want to dispute the activity you or other agents have noticed, but in this market, buyers like most consumers are fairly segmented. The kind of buyers realtors see are more often than not ready to take the plunge. There are many more buyers that really want to buy now but are too scared to take the plunge for a number of reasons: recession, unemployment, declining prices, no savings, not qualified, etc. Then there are buyers like me, probably the minority, that are much more pessimistic. Buyers like me actually want to buy but think the prices are too high to be sustainable. Some of us are conflicted because we realize that when bubbles pop they tend to return to the mean value pre-bubble and want the return to the mean and a level of normalcy with incomes, but in order for this to happen, the recession will only worsen and the pain will be greater for all of us.

Obviously this is a gross oversimplification, but the point is there are more buyer types out there than realtors realize and making an overall market judgment on only one segment of your consumer is probably not the wisest decision.

Based on some conversations I have had with other agents, they are beginning to see much more activity in the higher end of the market. Granted its only empirical data, but it does appear that volume is beginning to pick up.

If we go back a couple of years when all of this started, just the opposite was true. The higher end homes were unaffected and still seeing some activity, while the lower end homes had come to a standstill. The momentum is beginnng to change. It may not be sudden, but things are moving in that direction.

Regarding the current median list price vs. median pending price, doesn’t it concern you from a long-term stability standpoint that the discrepancy between the two is so large? The higher end of the market is getting killed which is clearly not good for stabilization as it will likely place additional downward pressure on prices.