Just when things were starting to look up, the events over the past two weeks involving the banks, lenders and other financial institutions have conspired to put a heavy brake on our local real estate market.

Again.

During the summer, the failure of a number of lenders, the collapse of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and other similar events produced a saw tooth looking sales market.  Up and promising one week, down and depressing the next.  As those events waned, the end of summer sales were surprisingly brisk, and it looked like for the first time since hurricane Katrina that our real estate sales would not take the sharp September drop seen each year. 

But no, this was not to last.  Yet another catastrophic failure of the financial markets, which to me are a result of 8 years of poor leadership in Washington, sunk our real estate sales.  Sales these past two week are running at about 50% of what we had been witnessing during the summer.  It make me wonder what sales would have been like this fall had these financial failures not occurred.  Then again, maybe it would be the same as the 3 previous years with sales in this resort market dropping off once the boaters left.