Leaving Skidmarks

"Bay Area home prices fell last month for the first time in more than four years, providing evidence that the region's seemingly unstoppable housing market could be starting to hit the skids."

"Sonoma County experienced the steepest drop in existing single-family home prices, at 8.2 percent."

Wait a minute... didn't some local REIC windbag say that buyers shouldn't be waiting for prices to drop because it wasn't going to happen? Didn't said windbag say that even in the last real estate bust that prices in the county only declined by something like 4% and that won't happen again?

Stay tuned, Baby!!! Looks like we already have doubled that decline and this can barely be called the beginning. You ain't seen nothin' yet!

(ps. advice from REIC gasbags is useful at this time if you are in need of a good belly laugh.)

"In Napa County, prices declined 6.5 percent and in Marin County, prices were off 3.3 percent."

"'This is an enormous real estate bubble, bigger than we've ever seen, and it's got to work its way out of the system one way or the other," said Christopher Thornberg, an economist in the Los Angeles office Beacon Economics, a consulting firm that focuses on the Western states."

"You've got to pay the piper."

"The Bay Area could be following other regions of the country that already have experienced a decline in prices."

'"Housing prices moved up too far, too fast relative to people's incomes,'' said Ken Rosen, chairman of the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics at UC Berkeley."

'"The affordability is worse here than most anyplace else, but San Francisco is not the only place this is happening."'

"Sellers say they are feeling the sting of a market that is no longer skewed in their favor."

'"It used to be that all you had to do is put up a 'for sale' sign in front of the house and tell people if they didn't put in an offer by a certain date, the house would be gone -- and it was," said Claudette Center, who is trying to sell a Bernal Heights home that belonged to her uncle."

"After gutting the kitchen, refinishing the floors and putting in new bathrooms, she still hasn't received any offers, and traffic at open houses has been slow, she said."

'"Last week nobody came," she said."

'"I understand that if I really want to sell the house fast, I'll probably have to drop the price," she said."

"Across the state, inventory more than doubled in the past year."

"As buyers continued to take their time, the number of all homes sold, new and existing, sank to a five-year low last month, dropping almost 30 percent from September 2005, DataQuick found."