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Well, I was looking at the polls, the sample size is statistically insignifant so far, the methodology is suspect, and okay, I did vote myself a couple times, but here's what I 've noticed.

1) Houses prices in the $300,000 range are most popular. Is this realistic? Maybe not, locally, that would mark a 30% retracement from current median prices - in California, even moreso. Cool. One thing is certain, even at $300,000 houses would be barely affordable for most first time buyers, unless interest rates go way down....

2) There's a strong consensus that the US sub-prime housing woes will spread to Canada, even if the pundits in the media are still only dispensing this possibility in code.

3) Nobody expects rates to go down, but whether they stay the same or go up seems to be the question.

4) Readers who happen to belong to Gen-X must already own homes, because revenue producing property was a popular choice for windfall inheritance money. Okay, popular is overstating it, but if more people vote it might be a popular choice later on.

5) Readers are expecting to buy or stay put in the next few years, not sell, showing that the discerning readers of this blog either sold already (at the top), or are waiting for buying opportunities, or don't give a damn about timing the market.

6) Some of our valued readers don't foresee a real buyer's market anytime in the next 5 years or so. The rest of us expect it to arrive in the next three years, with a few readers boldly predicting that the CREA hype this year will be wrong, and the correction will take place immediately. I remember saying something like that back in 2003.

Just to be clear, I think the situation now is different than back in 2003, or I wouldn't be writing this blog.

There you have it, an unscientific summary of the poll results so far.