Great post Terri! Playing safe may be the best advice at this reflection point of housing market.

After our exhausting open-house blitz, Melissa asked for my thoughts. Though I'm too young to have experienced the 1980s real-estate market implosion, something told me that things are going to get a lot worse for sellers before they get better. To get an expert's take, I asked Robert J. Shiller, a Yale economics professor, for his insight on where the East Coast real-estate market may be headed.

"We don't know exactly what's going to happen because we've just experienced the biggest housing boom this country has ever seen," he says. In addition to homeowners struggling to sell existing homes, construction is at near-record levels: The last time this much inventory entered the market was 1950, when builders were building suburban homes for soldiers returning from war, he says.

Prof. Shiller suggests that the Japanese housing bust may provide a precedent. Home prices there remained depressed for a decade before the market recovered. He says: "The real question is, 'Is this the beginning of a major period of decline as we saw in Japan, or will we see a kind of sharp and sudden correction?' "