Newsletter  
FALL - 2009

What a market!! It took a long time for reality to truly sink in that our Okanagan market isn’t immune to the economic down turn. Once that did happened though, we started to see prices that buyers perceive as fair value. That’s when the sales started happening. It’s really interesting; in the beginning of the year it was very hard to price a home when we had so few sales. I started tracking the sold price to the assessment and discovered a consistent pattern. If I followed that guide line, my listings sold. In the past 3 months I have sold off 23 of my own listings! In the first 6 months only 5 sold. Make no mistake, this has NOT been easy. Every offer starts out low and after negotiations we get the price to where everyone is happy, then we nurse the deals through to final condition removal. That in itself is another challenge. The banks are tougher, CMHC is fussier and buyers have no hesitation about walking if something isn’t quite what they expect. This is definitely a skill based business. The Realtors that don’t have the right skill set are gone. But you know, at the end of the day, this type of market is far more satisfying. When you finally get to hand off the keys, everyone is content they’ve done the right thing. 

 The general consensus is that we have now pretty much bottomed out.  I expect the winter sales to be steady and I am very excited about 2010.  I believe we will be quite steady with little price fluctuation, with 2011 being the beginning of the next cycle. I intend to take the next few months to re-organize and prepare for an extremely robust cycle, with an added twist – the Baby Boomer Phenomenon.