Hi Brad:

Great question and nice to have input from the Title side, I will be very interested in seeing your professional input on this forum.

To answer the first part of your question, my perspective is as follows:

This is a sellers market, as well as buyers market; or a balanced market, all depends on the location and the type of house you have.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, we have quite a few micro locations, where one location might be getting multiple offers still, but others are suffering, mostly due to the recent lending problems.

If you read the news, the headlines mostly screaming about being a buyers market and how the prices have dropped. Unfortunately, that's a good way to get readership and water cooler talks and have caused panic and reinforced the perception; and contributed to the negative side of the real estate market. . (Remember not too long ago, the same papers were screaming about multiple offers and sellers market and fueling the frenzy from the other direction)

So, we should be very careful when answering this question from our clients as there should be no blanket statment to your question.

This is why it’s even more important for the consumers to search for local Realtors assistance in the buy and/or sale of their homes; not only because they know the local market better, the Realtors can also help the consumers to navigate through the many steps which can be quite turbulent. As a voice from the title company, I am sure you can testify for that.

If you want to both buy and sell, again, it depends on whether you will be buying and selling in the same type of market (or same location). There was recently a question about buying and selling in similar location. I included a very simple example there. Instead of repeating myself, I will include the link below

http://www.trulia.com/voices/Home_Selling/Is_this_a_bad_time…

Best,
Sylvia

In your market? In our market area? In who's market area? You are certain to get some good opinions on this one Brad. In some areas of Riverside County it is certainly a buyers market. In other areas, it remains a seller's market yet, with few buyers...if that makes sense. There are some wonderful neighborhoods in our area that remain highly desirable where there are 0, yes zero homes for sale. Many areas throughout the state of California have similar areas. In these neighborhoods, homes do not last long on the market. You can not price them over market and expect a feeding frenzy but, you can expect multiple and competing offers. On the other side of things, we have overbuilt tract homes of marginal quality where it is virtually impossible, for the time being, to give one of them away. I have a friend in the area that owns a few of these and decided to test the market by listing and marketing the home at 150k less than the lowest priced and least desirable in the neighborhood. After 3 weeks, she had only one offer from one of those companies that makes blanket offers at 1/3 of whatever the listing price is and that was it. I don't even know if that neighborhood would even classify in the "buyers market" category.
So, all things considered, the market is...what the market does.