I think we are in a fairly normal market here. The market we are comparing to a year ago was an abnormal market.
The market could go into a lull phase for a while where prices flatten out because we've pulled a lot of (sales) activity from the future.
That part of the market is pretty stable, it's just that there's been across-the-board appreciation.
We knew this would happen, and it's happening later than we thought. We thought appreciation was going to come down. We definitely thought the entry and middle markets would be less strong than they are today.
It's part of a broader trend. Nationwide there are markets that have a ways to go, especially in the Midwest. But we're much closer to the end of the cycle than the peak. Now we're watching how it plays out -- whether it's going to smash into a wall or just level off for a while.
In most markets, the boom phase of the real estate cycle is behind us. The market is reestablishing a balance between supply and demand, buyers and sellers.
What we're watching for here carefully are signs of a significant downturn, especially for price declines ... There are hiccups here and there but as a whole the market does not seem to be showing any signs of an impending decline.
It's clearly a market mix issue. Expensive homes are not selling as fast as inexpensive homes.
The frenzied period is behind us. But that's good, from a market point of view. The abnormal market was the one we had a year or two ago.
Only if we have very short memories can we say there's a downturn in sales, or at least that sales are significantly low. This is actually as close to a normal market that we've had in seven to eight years.
It appears that today's market is probably as close to what we would call normal as we've had in a long time.