Buyers! Time that market!
Because it's a bubblehead article of faith that during the real estate boom there were no home buyers, only speculators disguised as home buyers, much of this is article is lifted from a longer piece I did in response to what I call the Bubblehead Manifesto.
The irony of this particular bubblehead belief is that the more intent buyers are on making a quick buck on real estate, the more likely they are to suffer from paralysis of analysis, and the less likely they are to actually buy real estate. It's almost like a built-in alarm that goes off Warning! Sucker Alert! every time they come close to making an offer. That's just my experience, of course, but I've probably worked with more buyers than the average bubblehead.
However, it occurred to me that buyers, paralyzed or otherwise, might learn from the only clients I ever worked with who were obsessed by what their home would be worth in the short term.
These astute market timers:
looked for a year for bargains that didn't exist while prices went up every month
finally bought a townhouse one month before the dot-com bust unleashed a flood of inventory and home prices collapsed (I'll admit I didn't see this coming either, but then again, it's been a long time since I thought I was smarter than the market)
called me in ecstasy every time some huckster with a listing in their development dangled an unrealistically high sales price in front of them
finally listed with an agent who told them their townhouse was worth at least $675k (this is called "buying the listing") while I insisted it was worth no more than $650k
sold their townhouse for $648k, enough to cover their initial investment, pay their selling and moving costs and maybe buy themselves a nice dinner; this rattled them so much that when they looked at the offer they accidentally speed-dialed me instead of their agent
decided to rent a single-family home for a while "until prices go down", instead of buying, which meant they were entering the rental market just as it started to get tight (email from their agent says "clients closing in a week in desperate need of rental home") after selling in a temporarily depressed resale market
rented in a neighborhood I'd recommended years ago, which they'd rejected as "inconvenient"
and by the way their old townhouse just sold for $680k, 5 percent more than they sold it for almost two years ago
Aside from that, they did everything right.
And, no, I'm not bitter. Why?