We treat it almost casually: “40k below an offer they turned down a few months ago.”
What a difference a year makes. For someone who needs to sell to “lose” $40,000 at this point of the downcycle is a huge loss. Just to put it into perspective, that $40k could represent 6 months of wages for a mid-career professional in this region. That $40k is equal in amount to the cumulative losses suffered during the entire 90-95 meltdown for an entry level tract home in the N.County area during that period. Many wage earners in this region could not save $40,000 if their life depended on it.
People in RE and related businesses get so accustomed to dealing with big numbers all the time that I think it’s easy to lose perspective of what those numbers represent. We’re talking about the same dollars we use to balance our checkbooks and pay our groceries. This ain’t Monopoly money, it’s the real thing.
