The lower end ($1M) has had sales but that’s the exception. Hard to call it a buyers market yet when there’s nothing priced to move.

1. Are the number of places for sale roughly equivalent in the three ranges, and has that changed?

2. Is it simply a matter of distance, or are there other factors involved? For example, a couple of years ago, loans were being given to practically anybody out there with a pulse. Which resulted in higher sales in the lower tier. Now that one actually has to have things like jobs and downpayments to qualify for a home loan, doesn’t that mean that some people who were formerly able to buy lower tier homes are now unable to, hence the smaller percentage of sales in the lower tier?

I really like this post. I missed it last month.

When homes became too ridiculously expensive during the bubble, many people employed the “drive ’til you qualify” tactic when purchasing. Now that prices are coming back down to earth, it would appear that the strategy has shifted to “wait until the neighborhood you want to buy in falls into your price range.”

Well, I’m not sure I see a strong trend signal in those graphs, they look fairly noisy to me. At the end of the day when the system gets closer to equilibrium, it’s still going to be cheaper to live farther away, so neighborhood preference will always have additional cost, and the main question is whether that cost is worth the benefit.

Now, it could be that if all prices fall 20%, then that differential has also fallen 20% and if someone’s preferences are more static and still worth, say, another $100 per month, then the gap has been bridged by a general decline in prices.

But, of course, that would bid up prices in the preferred neighborhoods relative to less desirable locations, which increases the gap again, etc… The distribution of house prices and who resides in what parts of the given housing stock must, eventually, have some relationship to the distribution of incomes and wealth. Top/bottom 20% areas are going to be occupied by top/bottom 20% earners in the long run, though perhaps there are some current imbalances and opportunities for tier-mobility in the short run.

IMO flat sales during the Summer from Winter is horrifying in a RE sense, where’s the summer bounce….or, LOL [to mimic some of the blogs], where’s the groves of summer knife catchers?