Somethin's up...

"There's something funny going on," he said, "I can just feel it in the air."

From "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts"-Bob Dylan

This is just a hunch, but I can just feel it coming. Like that itchy-nose feeling you get right before you sneeze.

And while I'm an absolute freak for current facts, precise data and statistical trending, sometimes these hunches can be a more reliable boat to climb into when you're heading into uncharted waters. Cervantes warned us that "facts are the enemy of truth", and I think I see where he was coming from.

Looking at the Las Vegas residential housing inventory (saturated) and the new lending guidelines (shall we say, uhhh, "a bit more rigid than we're used to"), a Realtor would have to be Pollyanna Pangloss to feel anything but dread about the market.

And yet...

I'm seeing things these days that tell me we're starting the comeback. Not that the comeback will be anywhere near as dramatic as either the "frenzy" (as we called the 2003-2005 market) or the "meltdown" (as the media has called this one), but that intuitive nudge is demonstrating signs of life in what had been a profoundly torpid market.

It makes perfect sense, really.

Honestly, it's human nature to say "enough's enough" after constant diets of bad news. Regardless of the subject, we can only take a limited amount of negative crap before we start resisting it and going the other way. Sometimes it's bad (the anger and shock of 9-11 wore off a hell of a lot quicker than it should have) and sometimes it's good (it is, frankly, about time the housing market stops fretting about housing and gets back to the business of living).

So while there's been a period of buyers waiting to "see how much further the market will slide" and sellers "holding off until 'the market comes back'", it seems that both entities are now realizing that now is now and the market is the market and to make the best of it.

That's activity, and it's the only thing that will bring us back. And I see it going on now.

I haven't done a specific, exhaustive research project of the numbers (partly because I don't have to: I've been so busy listing homes and looking for properties for buyers in the last two weeks that any research on whether the market is heating up is superfluous), so you can call this a SWAG (an acronym my friend Yvonne taught me this week that stands for Scientific Wild Ass Guess), but I'm going on record as saying that this is the beginning of the end of this slump. And by the time the numbers get around to bearing me out, you can say you heard it here first.

One last (I swear I mean LAST) word on all things Disney.

In the previous (September 27) entry I was lamenting the marketing tentacles of Disney and the ensuing erosion of something or another (specificaly my checking account, but in general, the soul of our children).

Then comes this story about how Disney has leant Mickey, Minnie, Goofy et al to the hawking of fruits & vegetables to our kids in an effort to stem the tide of childhood obesity in this country.

If they pull it off, I'll take back every single ugly thing I ever said about the company. Even if they don't make any significant difference in how many fat kids we produce, I'll give them a pass for making an effort. So there.