Happy New Year everyone.  2009 has had a refreshingly uneventful start with equity markets beginning to make up some of the huge losses incurred in the last quarter of last year.   With a new President in the U.S. and the return of Parliament here in Canada at month’s end, people seem to be in a hold pattern, waiting to see what happens in the short-term before making any long term predictions for the Real Estate market.

Before Christmas, I ran numbers complied from Parry Sound Real Estate Board statistics that show a marked decline in activity for the previous year.  Overall, total cottages sales in our Board area were down by over 37 percent for 2007 when compared to the previous year.

That’s a significant drop and confirms what I suspected all year.  It also answers the question as to why it seemed so difficult to sell waterfront cottages last year (a fact of which I have firsthand experience).

I’ll attempt to figure out why the market droppped so much and what lies in store for 2009.