Yikes. Every so often I check zillow.com for the estimated value of my home. Prices have been falling, but since I last checked, they’ve gone way down in my neck of the woods. So, at the moment, at least according to zillow, our home is now worth $92,500 less than what my husband and I paid for it in 2004. Plus one of our neighbors just parked a huge trailer on the front of his property. He’s got it on gravel in front of one side of his little home, so he’s probably OK as far as codes go around here, but the thing is massive, as tall as his house and maybe a third as wide as his home (a quarter if you count the garage, I suppose) and sticking out all the way to the sidewalk. It’s a eyesore and brings down the curb appeal for all the nearby homes. But, he says, he can’t afford the storage fee for where he used to keep it. Oh well. we’re not planning to move anyime soon, so hopefully by the time we do need to sell this place (many years down the road, I hope), it’ll be worth at least what we paid for it. How much longer is this real estate freefall going to last, anyway? If I were longing to be a homeowner, it seems now would be an ideal time to jump into the market because of low prices and low interest rates and the likelihood that interest rates will rise when the fed decides to try to do something about inflation, but obviously people who are thinking about buying homes don’t agree. Otherwise they’d be traipsing through all the open houses on weekends, imagining what their furniture would look like inside, what kind of landscaping they might like to do, whether they like the local schools — all that. But that’s not what’s happening, and home values continue to sink. At times like this I remind myself real estate, like many other things is cyclical. Up and down it goes, and we all just make the best decisions we can given the conditions we perceive.