This year I’m trick or treating as a housing market bubble.

Is it a scarey costume or a cute one?

I’ve been getting fairly busy lately, and some of my colleagues have been telling me that they, too, have had a lot going on in the past few weeks. I checked in on my friend Nan Raley at REMAX and her opinion was that prices had come down enough to knock many of the fence sitters off of the fence and get them moving. Certainly I don’t recall ever being this active this late in the year, but that could be partly from working a larger share of my own business and referring less of it out.

Meantime there are lots of predictions of further price reductions, througout 2007. I read at the California Association of Realtors® web site that CAR is predicting for the Central Valley a drop that will outstrip their statewide prediction of 2%.

I’ve been telling folks that I expect things to slow down fairly substantially between Thanksgiving and Christmas (because that’s what it always does), but I expect things to pick up again well after that time. However, I do agree with CAR that prices will continue to fall, albeit not at the pace they did this year. It’s possible, however, that this optimism is misplaced. I can say that when prices were rising they continually surprised me by how much and how fast.

I’ve been somewhat less surprised on the downtrend, simply because there’s such a well established cottage industry of pessimism, but perhaps I’ll have to revise that next year. Meantime I’m enjoying the fall rush!

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