“Agree very much with you, AN. It’s easy to throw away someone else’s “few thousand.” For many people, that can represent many months or years of savings. It’s a BIG deal.”

If you bid what you perceive based on your research and that of your agent to be fair market value than you have not thrown anything away. Now if you want to buy your dream house under fair market value than that is another issue.

“These changes come in tiny increments. There are houses now being listed in the high-$600-$800K range that would have listed for $800K-$1MM+ a few years ago.”

Yes this is the challenge with purchasing in this environment. Things are changing so quickly that fair market value is a moving target. In my case things changed so quickly during my search that I went from looking inland to buying on the coast since prices moved down so much during the two years that I was searching.