Life when the old rules don't apply anymore.

Life when the old rules don't apply anymore.

Not that I'm famous for my gun-fighter nerves, but I haven't been able to buy into the panic surrounding the latest recession and real estate downturn.

Yes, I know, the world economy teetered on the brink of catastrophe, and maybe it did slide over the brink and catch its balance at the last nano-second, but the experience left me so strangely unmoved that I began to worry. Maybe I was a walking advertisement for the benefits of cluelessness (or for eternal optimism, which I'm pretty sure isn't the same thing). Maybe I labored under the mistaken impression that there are lots of bright people out there who can bail us out of the messes other bright people get us into—not overnight, and not without regrettable social cost, but soon enough and well enough if we're in a hurry to get back to the good times. Then too, maybe I was jaded: maybe I'd finally seen enough to understand that these things always get sorted out, rarely equitably, but well enough to get us back on the road to the next end-of-the-world catastrophe. Or maybe all the real and imagined crises of the early 2000s—the Y2K computer meltdown, the dot-bust, 9/11, the Iraq invasion jitters—had tapped me out; maybe I didn't have any more to give to the general fund of panic.

Or maybe it's because the active agent spends his career putting out fires, usually not of his own making—call it crisis fatigue.

Not that I've sailed through this downturn without a care. I doubt that any self-employed businessperson ever completely loses the feeling he walks a tightrope, even in good times. In bad times, the rope seems higher, and the safety net that was never there is conspicuous by its absence.

In any case, I wasn't feelin' it. Until a few days ago. And I'm still not feelin' it. But now I think I finally get it.

A few Tuesday mornings ago I was out on broker's tour, looking at homes that had just come on the market in San Mateo County, and had parked in a quiet San Carlos neighborhood (is there any other kind?) and was getting out of the car. Maybe I was looking extra approachable that morning, and for sure I was driving my wife's cute-'n'-amiable perky-red puddle-jumper (the elitist Mercedes was in the shop again). Whatever the reason, a neighbor working in his front yard ambled over to me. This, by itself, was remarkable; most neighbors duck when they see agents descending on their neighborhood.

But this guy had something big on his mind. "Is the market any better?", he asked quietly, anxiously. I could have launched into the "today is a great day to buy and sell real estate" spiel Brand X Brokerage (not Coldwell Banker) laid on me in newbie training years ago, except that a) I try to level with people, and b) everyone always believes the worst about the state of real estate anyway, so why shoot yourself in the foot trying to convince them otherwise? except when c) it really is otherwise. For several years starting in 2005 I reassured people that reports of real estate's death were greatly exaggerated—at least until the late 2008 financial crisis knocked a good deal of liveliness out of our own market, years after places like Modesto rolled over and died—and during those several years I got lots of polite smiles and very few takers. Because the news said real estate had gone belly up, so by God real estate was belly up, even as mid-Peninsula prices went up.

So I said, sure, the market had been slow lately, but the market is always slow late summer. "Yes, I've seen lots of For Sale signs", he said. "Nothing seems to be selling." Well, I said, we'll see how things go the next few weeks. The market usually gets its second wind after Labor Day. If it doesn't this year, we'll know something's up. He looked thoughtful and said, "You're talking about a normal year. Things haven't been normal lately."

I started to assure him that real estate has rules that are as close to certainties as any market can claim—if X happens, Y is the likely consequence—and then it hit me:

For him, and for lots of people like him, the normal rules don't apply anymore. For them, we're in the "new normal", the new reality where left is right and up is down and all bets are off.

Wow! A universe without rules, or at least without the old familiar rules. How disorienting—how frightening—is that?

Yes, I finally get it. I'm still so not feelin' it—it takes more than what we're going through to suspend the laws of market physics, and in fact the takeaway lesson from this disaster is that, boom or bust, the old familiar rules still apply, even when the "new normal" says otherwise—but I finally get it.