Buyer's Market? What Buyer's Market?

Does the overall market downturn represent a buyer’s market, as I recently suggested? Not to one reader. "Pardon me while I scoff in your general direction," wrote in political blogger Greg Decker.

"The Massachusetts real estate market is a buyers market in the same sense that Mars is a terraformable planet," said Greg. "Technically, maybe, but just try and take advantage of the fact on your current salary.

"I currently make a good deal more than the median income for the town I live in, and yet the median SFH goes for nearly twice what I can reasonably afford (assuming I could scrape together a down payment of 20%). Whatever "huge sums" the prices are being reduced by, it isn't a reduction by half."

Greg makes a fair point. Even price reductions of $75,000 or more – and we’ve seen a lot of them in our search this year – don’t make a real dent in the absurdly skewed prices that emerged from the last real estate boom. With our strictly middle-class salaries, if Jordan and I weren’t DINKS (double-income, no kids) we could in no way afford to be buying right now. There's something fundamentally disturbing about that.