Maven: No House Party

Examples have been chronic in print and on television so let me touch upon a few so you'll know what to recognize. After all, this is not a market to jump back into. The demographic push of baby boomers buying homes coinciding with the taming of inflation (and thus interest rates) over the past generation has been enormous. With baby boomers starting to downsize and inflation and interest rates trends, at best, in flux, this is a market that could very well not perform better than inflation over the next generation.

A key element to making the argument that there has been no true shift in the market is to deny the very fact that prices are starting to drop. This was done recently, in all its vacuous glory, by Samuel Lieber, the president of Alpine Mutual Funds, while speaking on CNBC. He sounded like a local real estate agent, trying to convince a young couple that they were not buying into a "down" market but an "adjusting" one.

"We are," he said, "transitioning from a period where people had to pay the offer price or above to a period where they are looking at a more normalized bid/offer spread. It's just they don't know ... where that proper pricing will be."

Sounds like prices are plummeting, buddy.

The key step to assessing whether a market has hit bottom is to read and listen. When you hear people honestly assessing the damage and professing no hope -- that's a bottom. When people are in denial and are slinging jargon -- well, we ain't there yet.

Lieber continued, calling it a "unique time to be a buyer" (inventories rising, prices falling, demographics turning from help to horror -- I'll say it's unique) and adding that the current numbers are not an indication of confidence but "a reaction to houses staying on the market longer."