Okay, it's 2008 and real estate is my oyster. Or so I tell myself. After more than 6 months of relentless bad news pertaining to home sales, the new selling season has started here. In my market, one of the few in the US still holding promise, two houses sold in bidding wars last weekend. My own buyer dance card was full and I traipsed around the Essex County, NJ with carfuls of people who can't wait to live here. Their enthusiasm goes a long way toward allaying real fears I wake up with and chew on with toast and Chai tea over the daily New York Times and Wall Street Journal, where coverage of all the awful things happening to reckless US banks, short-sighted homesellers who took on too much and, even, over the last few days, a French bank's outrageous market loses at the hands of a single rogue trader. Seven billion dollars down the tube? It's impossible to wrap your head around that.
On NPR yesterday, a discussion about Pollyanna, the girl in the popular 1913 novel who quickly became a symbol of everything positive in the world on the eve of war and then, over time, morphed into an emblem of overarching, giddy silliness; a naive optimist for whom decency would prevail in a screwed up world.
And now, as foreclosures tumble on the market by the hundreds, as the duller houses without updates or great locations come up short against fussy buyers in search of bargains, it's easy to lose the positive edge each of us in real estate needs. So, I'm just going to be a Pollyanna this year, looking for the good in everyone, hoping we will all work together to make a better real estate world in Montclair, NJ and beyond.
