limoshawn - 11:46 am on Aug 12, 2007 (gmt 0)

martinibuster is spot on here.
Having been in the real estate industry for the past 18 years as a licensee, investor, developer, and SEO I can say with some authority that what we're looking at is a "snapshot in time" that can be used to to facilitate what ever gloom and doom is needed for that news broadcast.

The bottom line is that the core of the real estate industry is healthy. If we look outside of today's snapshot we see that the three years leading up to the current "situation" most of the country was realizing what I like to call stupid appreciation. In some areas real estate was appreciating at over 30% which is insane considering the normal average appreciation since the beginning of all recordkeeping has been 3%. There is no market (not even California) that can sustain that kind of growth for any amount of time.

We are currently in a correction cycle. The real estate ATM is closed, time to go back to work.