Buyers have had a tough go of it for the past year or so but it is finally their opportunity to get a bargain.

The number of sales has rapidly declined (see the MarketWatch Report from the Toronto Real Estate Board for the most recently available statistics) and from what I am seeing Buyers are sitting on the fence waiting to see what happens. The end result is slow moving properties.

While I totally understand the feeling that one should "wait", I think it is a dangerous strategy. One only has to look back at the market decline at the end of 2008 to see how incredibly short lived it can be and how incredibly rapidly it can rebound.

I think most people waited at the end of 2008 and most people lost out.

Some of the best investors of our time, Warren Buffett and Sir John Templeton have both indicated that trying to time things perfectly is a strategy that usually fails. You are better to buy just before the "bottom" and know you got a deal rather than waiting to reach the bottom and missing it completely.

Real Estate Statistics are usually released after about a one month lag (sometimes three months if you are looking at quarterly reports for all of Canada). This means that by the time you read that prices are "starting to rise" you are probably too late. They will have already risen substantially in the real world.

So the bottom line is...buy now.

I know this sounds like a line from a Real Estate Agent, but I truly believe it is the wise thing to do.

Alan