The Market Isn’t Falling Apart. Your Memory Is.
The Effect of Presentism and the Freezing of Buyers
We live in a discretionary luxury market. Scenic Highway 30A is not Memphis, Phoenix, or anywhere else the national commentators like to use to sell fear. Our buyers choose to be here. They are not forced by job relocations, distress, or life disruptions. They are pulled by desire — the desire for time, beauty, family, and escape.
But even in a high-discretion market, people fall into the same trap: presentism — the inability to remember the long-term trend, the inability to hold the full picture while standing in one volatile moment, the belief that whatever the last ninety days felt like must be the entire story.
It isn’t. And today I want to show you something simple and grounding.
When you look at buyer levels on 30A East and West from 2010 to 2020… then extend the same chart through 2023… and then extend it again through 2025… one truth becomes impossible to ignore:
We are right back inside the long-term buyer range. Not collapsing — normalizing.
A luxury market returning to normal does not feel calm — it feels confusing. But confusion comes from losing the baseline, not from anything actually breaking.
The Premise — Supply, Demand, and the Illusion of Chaos
Real estate at the luxury level is not magic.
More buyers than inventory → prices rise.
More inventory than buyers → prices soften.
Balance → prices stabilize.
When you anchor yourself in that simple relationship, the noise quiets. What feels like a crisis becomes nothing more than a regression to the mean.
The entire challenge right now is psychological, not economic. People are comparing today to 2021 instead of to the last fifteen years. My concern for buyers right now is that we are very late in the cycle of returning to normal. “Deals,” low offers, and “I’ll wait” mantras are emerging — often from the same people who believed prices were too high in 2010, 2015, and 2017. You get the point.
While we have had a great deal of price appreciation, I hate to break bad news to you: a great deal of that pricing increase is going to hold here — unless we get some non–real-estate event.
Buyer Levels — The Long Arc
2010–2019: The True Baseline
For a decade, our market operated inside a predictable buyer band. Seasonal fluctuations, yes — but a stable, healthy range that actually defines 30A’s discretionary behavior. (blue is monthly sales scaled and Orange is Inventory Levels)
2020–2023: Distortion and Return
COVID shattered that channel. Demand shot above anything we’d ever seen. Homes were bought sight unseen. Logic dissolved. This was not a new normal — it was an extreme event.
By 2022–2023, buyers didn’t disappear. They simply moved back into the long-term range that had existed for ten years. (blue is monthly sales scaled and Orange is Inventory Levels)
2023-2025: The Return
And how about just this return to normal? (blue is monthly sales scaled and Orange is Inventory Levels)
And if “It” Never Happened:
I wonder what we would be doing if this was the chart of 30A home inventory and monthly Sales? (blue is monthly sales scaled and Orange is Inventory Levels)
Does this look like an out of balance market or just a market moving along wiggling and shaking a bit here and there?
What It Means Right Now on 30A
I suggest strongly if you wanted to be here for your family, while you seldom here it from me, Now is beginning to be the right time to engage. I cannot help you if you 100% believe that real estate absent any other event is going to fall meaningfully from here in our discretionary luxury market. I can only show you our a former private equity person trained as an economist looks at facts. It is always a good time to buy if you are ready and you want the memory and I always support that as you know.
Join me in this published and coming along series if you want to know where I stand on that and why…..it is always a good time to buy for life.
But economically? It is not always a good time to buy for every reason you can think of. You have not heard me say it was a good time to buy for some time. And I am on record as saying pricing will not rise meaningfully from here for a bit, but I believe we are at or extraordinarily close enough to the cycle bottom that it really probably does not matter to those who are well grounded and want to seek life now. A balanced markets eventually bring clarity but not to buyers and sellers at the same time.
Offers are happening again because buyers are comfortable. That is why the monthly sales numbers are rising over 2024 levels and returning to patterns similar to 2017 and 2018 — a healthy market.
Negotiations are rational because inventory isn’t suffocating the market. Real negotiations start at real anchoring. Gandhi died at 78.
Prices stabilize because supply and demand have — or are beginning to — return to their natural relationship.
The only people suffering are the outliers — the fantasy-priced listings that were misaligned with buyer behavior from day one.
Everyone else is navigating a healthy, mature, discretionary market.
Closing Thought — Memory Is a Competitive Advantage
In a luxury discretionary market, clarity is rare. Most people live in emotional snapshots. But the ones who remember the long-term trend — the real baseline — make better decisions, feel less fear, and navigate with confidence.
We’re not in a market crisis. We’re in a return to normal. And normal is a very good place for 30A. But this market is about family and memory. Join us.
Teaser — What Comes Next
Every Monday for a while, I’m going to drill deeper and deeper into narrower segments of this market — neighborhood by neighborhood, product by product, price band by price band.
If you want to know where your home or your search sits in the long-term trend before the next deep dive?
Just call me.