As long as I am talking about yesterday's Seattle Times article on the March home sales statistics I thought I would show you this graph. The article talks at some length about the concept of "stickiness." They define stickiness as the sellers' unwillingness to cut prices. However, I think stickiness, as the Times uses it, could equally be defined as the Buyers' unwillingness to pay more for a house.

I prepared this graph for a client of mine (yes, the client's version is a much bigger). I think it shows a great example of stickiness. The green line represent the average asking price for all condos in King County from December of 2006 through February of 2008. The red line is the actual sold prices of all King County condos in the same time period.

Note that the asking prices are almost universally above $450,000 while the actual sold prices are almost universally below $350,000. That's a big difference.

Regardless of the definition, the bigger question is, who is going to blink first? As long as there is a divide between asking and actual prices there will be very little activity. When the divide starts to narrow we will see the activity pick up, the inventory drop off and the time on market shorten.

So, who do I think will blink first?

That one I'll keep to myself for now!

-Chris