I woke up to the headline in the http://www.dailyprogress.com saying "Local housing market called 6th best in U.S."  You can see the article by cutting and pasting this link http://www2.dailyprogress.com/news/2011/oct/01/report-charlottesville-has-one-nations-best-housin-ar-1351715/ to in your url field.  I must admit this information caught me by surprise.  My initial thought was "if we have the 6th best housing market in the US", the rest of the country is in a whole lot of trouble.  Why, because, in my opinion, we are still not even in a recovery stage of what has been now a 6 year downturn.  There are certainly signs that we may very well be bumping along the bottom but what that means is there are homes that are now selling while others sit on the market.  The reason; there are still almost 3500 homes on the market representing over 15 months of inventory.  The average sales price for homes sold in September was the lowest it has been since March of 2011. We live in a great part of this country.  Charlottesville, VA and The University of Virginia http://www.virginia.edu are regularly and consistently ranked amongs the nations very best places to live and go to school.  What does all this mean?  We are not even close to coming out of this challenging real estate market.  Sellers still need to be very aggressive with their pricing and have their homes in good condition.  The good news is that when a home is well priced and in good condition, there are buyers waiting to buy them.