It's Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. " The year 2018 was one of ebbing expectations. Early in the year the local market was still rather robust with limited inventory and relatively strong demand from buyers. Sellers were still seeing multiple offers – though fewer than last year – and selling prices often exceeded asking prices. This is the model both buyers and sellers had come to expect, the new normal that began in earnest in 2013-2014 as we recovered from the Great Recession."

"Then summer arrived. You could almost smell it in the air – buyers had had enough of escalating prices, multiple offers, trying and trying to get a house only to find something that was less than they wanted for more money than they wanted to spend."

"After years of skyrocketing home prices, why has King County’s real estate market begun going in the opposite direction? It’s pretty simple: With fewer buyers competing over more homes, the days of furious bidding wars that jack up home prices are over. The average buyer actually now has enough negotiating power to get a house for less than the list price; and in about a fourth of listings, sellers are just lowering their asking prices because they didn’t get any nibbles."

" It’s part of a national trend of inventory finally starting to rise slightly; prices are even falling a tad in a few West Coast cities, like Portland and Vancouver, B.C., though the changes have been more dramatic here than anywhere else."

"With rising interest rates, slowing sales, and some owners cutting prices, the Southern Nevada housing market is showing the first signs of weakness since its comeback from the Great Recession. But Heidi Kasama, president of Nevada Realtors Association, believes we're not seeing the beginnings of another housing crisis. Instead, she calls it a slow down."

"Kasama said the softness going on in the market right now is part of what's been going on over the past few months. She thinks Southern Nevada will continue to see a drop in prices but not a dramatic bubble burst as we experienced in the Great Recession. 'A slow down is frankly warranted at this point,' she said, 'We can't continue with 6 and 7 percent price appreciation every month.'"

"Real estate investor Peter Lezeska had high hopes when he listed his totally refurbished multi-family property for sale late last spring. The triple-residency property is located at 1059 Atlantic Ave. in trendy North Winton Village, and Lezeska wanted to fetch in the $350,000 range."

"It was expected to go quickly, but it languished for months before it sold in November for $310,000. 'The market has turned,' said Lezeska, who is a Realtor as well as a house flipper. 'We're not getting the prices that we're used to.'"

"A new report from the Austin Board of Realtors found while we are seeing a slight decrease in the number of homes sold within Austin city limits. Mustian and Tracey Wallace are newlyweds who recently sold a condo and bought a house."

"' I thought it was going to be super easy,' said Mustian. 'I was like, oh for sure, our place is just going to, go on sale and a day later, we're going to have six offers.' That's what happened two and a half years ago when Wallace had to compete against other offers to buy, but selling it now, they said, was a little more challenging."

"'We had a bunch of foot traffic into our condo but no real offers until about a month in,' Wallace said."

"It’s been a year of high highs and low lows in Kelowna’s real estate market. It was announced with much fanfare that the average selling price of a single-family home in the city hit a record high of $782,398 in July. However, a slowdown quickly followed and the average price nosedived to $650,785 by November. That’s a plunge of $131,613, or 17 per cent."

"All the stars aligned in 2017 and early 2018 to make the Kelowna market soar. The economy was buoyant, consumers were confident and homeowners in Vancouver were selling their places for an average of $1.6 million and coming to the Okanagan to buy a similar place for half the price."

"The Vancouver market eventually cooled and that chill spread to the Okanagan. It’s an adjustment, for sure, from the recent sellers’ market, in which homes were priced high and often fetched more when frenzied potential buyers started bidding. Homes sit on the market a long time and sellers usually have to drop the price to attract a buyer."

"25 years ago, my parents bought their home in Melbourne for about $2 million less than they sold it for on Saturday 24 November 2018. As a nation we funded the housing boom by borrowing. Australia’s household debt to income ratio is nearing 200 per cent, one of the highest levels in the world."

"That’s how the lucky family that paid just over $2 million for a bungalow in inner-city Melbourne can the afford the thing. CoreLogic’s Cameron Kusher said: 'the last 30 years have been all about making credit more freely available.'"

"Gary Jacobs of Allen & Jacobs, with offices in Blackrock and Dublin 8’s Clanbrassil Street, says prices have fallen and the same prices are not being achieved now that were last spring. But he isn’t advising vendors to drop prices – at least not yet. 'There are so many buyers not in the market, now is not the time to make a call on reducing prices.'"