I just finished reading Matt Heaton's post with his predictions for 2009.  When I finished it, I was thinking, "Well crap!"  Here we go again, but it could be even worse - so bad that even Barak Obama won't be able to fix it! 

But wait! 

This doesn't mean that it has to be a bad year for me, or for that matter, for any of us.  We just have to look at the challenges of this market and figure out how to make it work.

For me, the white hot market we had here between about 1998 and 2006 made me want to move to Houston where things seemed more normal.  Here, each listing was posted on Thursday with offers presented the following Wednesday night.  And unless a house was hideous and reeked of kitty litter, it would have between 30 and 50 offers.  If your buyers lost the bidding war, which they usually did, they were bummed.  If they were the lucky winners, they'd wake up a few days later is a terrible panic because they'd paid too much - and because they had to give up every contingency, they'd have to buy the place or forfeit a huge earnest money deposit.  I like working with buyers, and for me, this market sucked.

In 2009, I'm not going to make any judgments about the market.  Instead, I'm going to figure out how to work it for all it's worth.  That will mean listing carefully and getting the buyer broker thing down to a science. Who knows?  It could even get fun, and whatever happens, I'm sure there will be lots of fabulous blog fodder!