NYTimes article: For the Brave, the Moment is NOW

Where's SteveF?

This article is the kind of porn that SteveF pays top dollar for.

Where he at?

"And now, brokers say," "brokers said" "“Our traffic has turned around,” Ms. Armstead said,"

All brokers always say now is the time to buy, the Times are just idiots to believe them.

“The meat-and-potatoes buyers are coming out right now,” said Kristina Leonetti, a broker at the Corcoran Group."

Is this a euphemism for dumb buyers?

"Barbara Rellstab, a real estate broker and former actress, " "The asking price was $699,000, but she bought it for $9,000 less."

If anyone ever thought brokers were worth using, this shows they can't even negotiate for themselves! 1% off, woohoo, brokers are so cool at negotiating! And being an actress is great background for a broker, as they know how to read scripts ("now is the time to buy!"), and can lie to your face and you will believe them, they are so realistic!

“The minute everyone feels the market has leveled off, you are going to see people coming out of the woodwork to buy,” Mr. Rich said.

Every time prices have "leveled off" in the past, it took years to recover. But maybe this time is different!

The weekly RE section is pure PR (free advertising).

the article was quite naive and bizarre in many respects. Celebrate a 9k discount on a 700k property. Really!
On the other hand, the open houses I went to the last 2 weekends have been very busy in contrast to the previous few months. However, it may be that people are looking to see if there is something that they can make much lower offers on -- this is my motivation.
So far, have not seen anything attractive enough that is deserving of an offer (20-40% off) that I would be thrilled to live in

I agree with joedavis

Seen lots of people walking in and out but no one biting. Brokers emailing me and telling me to just make an offer, any offer. I suspect they want to leverage some how.

This article was discussed at length a couple of days ago, before poster "hirschrandev" jammed and spammed the entire board.

If "meat and potatoes" ordinary folk are the buyers of last resort, then stevehjx is probably right about prices reverting to traditional measures of affordability.

Whoops--didn't see the earlier post re: this article.

From experience, reading the RE section every Sunday, I feel like they are usually fairly neutral, they do seem to avoid printing bad news, which is not necessarily bad since, every other publication feels free to do so. I was reading a thread, It looks like it was entitled "buyers coming back" and it was related this article, people felt very passionate about the fact that the report was based on a few samples and it did not have any hard quantitative data. I think that qualitative data is just as important, although everything is subjective and should be taken as such. I am sure that in some cases, there are buyers out there, it all depends on who they are and what they are looking for. Not every property is half off :) (not to say that they are, but there is no hard evidence that everything is 20 to 35% off, or that prices will continue to drop by xyz, likely by the end of this year things will begin to normalize and I think that the new presidency will have a positive effect in our socioeconomic landscapes and overall perception of how things are.

The NY Times RE section is NOT a news section. Go to nytimes.com. Notice it is alongside autos/jobs/classifieds. It is separated from the journalism sections...

The day that made this the most clear was one last September or so, where one Sunday had a rosy story on the section front page, and the front page of the times itself was about a major RE crash...

> but there is no hard evidence that everything is 20 to 35% off

No, the hard evidence shows that the average is 20% off on contracts. Meaning some more, some less...