Well…you’ve all read about my real estate saga that played out over the past 7 months or so, but new statistics emphasize just how lucky I was to find and buy a house in this market. Just yesterday as I was doing my normal reading, I was astonished to see that the stock of available housing for sale is down almost 50% from last spring…and that is one factor in how screwed up the market is….when I was talking to my brother the realtor the other day, his new reality is the asking price has nothing to do with how much a house will sell for….in my case, I immediately bid 10K over the asking since I knew it was the best house I had seen and had everything I wanted and I didn’t want to lose it….in the cases my brother talked about, he is selling houses for 30 to 40K over asking and has 20 or more bids in on all of them….and the days of it taking months to sell you house is long gone unless it is a dump like all of the houses I looked at before I found mine. I guess what I have to say is that, as time goes on, I feel more and more lucky to almost have the whole thing behind me and to have a place to live that I’ll be in two weeks from yesterday…phew…