Today’s home sellers are faced with only unpleasant choices in most housing markets.

• They can hang in there and hope for yesterday’s prices… which means they could be in for a VERY long wait.
• They can lower the price and either see no profit or be forced to add money to the pot in order to sell
• They can do a short sale and see their credit scores plummet
• They can take the home off the market and wait until home prices rise again

None of these choices makes a home seller happy, but with the exception of a few markets, they’re today’s reality. Only those who purchased their homes 20 or 30 years ago will sell without taking a financial loss.

Some sellers, unable to accept the reality of today’s market, are hanging in there, hoping for the price they want. Barring a miracle, they’ll be in for a long wait, because with prices falling as much as 30% – and up to 50% in some markets, no buyer will bother looking at a home that’s overpriced by today’s standards.

That means hoping, waiting, and the added stress of keeping a home in show-ready condition at all times. Most people don’t live in show-ready homes as a rule. We leave appliances sitting on the counter, newspapers scattered by our favorite chairs, and cosmetics sitting on the bathroom vanity. All that is a no-no when your home could be shown at any moment.

Unfortunately for over priced home sellers, “any moment” doesn’t come often enough. Maintaining their homes in that condition is akin to being “All dressed up with nowhere to go” all day, every day.

Other sellers – those who must sell under duress – have a different set of anxieties. They don’t know if they’ll be able to find a buyer for a short sale, and if they do find a buyer, if their mortgage loan servicer will agree to the short sale terms. After that, they worry if the buyer will be able to obtain a mortgage loan. Their lives are nothing but huge bundles of uncertainty. And all the while, they’re wondering if they’re going to join the ranks of the homeless.

Real estate agents and mortgage brokers are facing stress too. They’re under tremendous pressure to do right by their clients, and worried constantly about getting the transactions to closing so they can pay their own mortgage payments.

The whole situation is making ordinary citizens victims of a syndrome not unlike Post Traumatic Stress Disease. The difference is that with PTSD the sufferers have witnessed violence, death, or other life-threatening events. In today’s housing markets, the events are taking place in people’s minds as they worry and envision the worst-case scenarios that could affect their lives.

The distress and the accompanying depression, however, are no less real.

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