Dickens is one of my favorite novelists, and never were his words as prescient as they seem now:
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."
I had a dear friend who, in the most trying times, would say, in her deep Southern drawl, "Ah do buhlieve this is thu end of tahm."
It may not be the end of time, but with the failure of government to choose the better option of helping people to stay in their homes --- or give more tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires --- it certainly feels like most of us are in a very deep hole we many not dig out of for decades. Many of us are fortunate to have the proverbial roof over our heads and food on the table, but for hundreds, maybe thousands of families that comfort may not exist for long.
I wax nostalgic for the 80s and early-to-mid 2000s when many of us in the Luxury Market, in Franklin Lakes and Wyckoff were writing contracts on the trunk of our cars so we could present them before the 6 other Realtors doing the same. Well, nostalgia is called that because it's in the past, and so are the gravy days of the Real Estate Luxury Market, except when Sellers bite the bullet and price their homes for this market. I've felt the pain they're feeling because I lived it, in the early 90s when the Franklin Lakes market took a huge nosedive. I went from a $1,065,000 offer on my home, in 1988, to a $715k offer, in 1991. Even Realtors can be greedy and stupid. It was a painful lesson that took me years to recover from, so I pass that information on to my clients so they know it isn't "easy to ask for big price reductions" on their homes because I remember too well being in their shoes.
Franklin Lakes, Saddle River, Wyckoff and the other upscale towns will rebound, but not quickly. When Sellers ask me if they should wait to sell their homes "until the market gets better," I tell them my crystal ball is rusty, but I wouldn't be waiting unless I could afford to wait 5-15 years. How do I know it might take that long? Because it took 15 years for my home to be worth over a million $$ again.
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