This article repeats a thesis we’ve heard a lot recently: The market’s alleged slowdown is a healthy return to normalcy, a healthy, stabilizing trend that is occurring in lieu of a dramatic bursting of the bubble :

“It’s been an overheated market for so long that it is a slowdown, but this slowdown is kind of like what we used to have all the time, which is a normal market,” said Deanna Kory, a senior vice president at the Corcoran Group

We don’t get the sense that the market it slowing down much at all–at least in Brownstone Brooklyn. (We can’t speak to whether the public’s appetite for $1.5 million postwar three-bedrooms on the Upper East Side is waning.) We think all that may be happening is that seller’s having just gotten out of hand in their asking prices, so that we may be seeing more instances of listings selling below ask. If the foot traffic we saw at 41 Monroe Street yesterday is any indication, there are still plenty of people hungrily trying to find a place to call their own. Of course, we may be a little nonchalant simply because we’re not planning to sell any time in the near future. How about those buyers who are actively in the market for a brownstone? Are you still encountering multiple-party bidding wars and feeding frenzies around well-priced deals? We expect so.

As for the statistic above, as much as we like Professor Shiller’s work in general (we interviewed him a decade ago in a previous professional incarnation), we don’t give it much weight. We may well be in for rude end to the party for a lot of reasons, but we doubt that the number of times that bandwagon journalists have used the term is a particularly good indicator of the impending doom.

Signs of a Spring Slowdown [NY Times]