Buyers: Inactive by Choice?

A compelling and mostly unanswered question: why are home sales sluggish?

There's a myriad of potential explanations to this question, many of which have already been talked about at length by others, including us. Most of these explanations are at least somewhat valid and salient, and the true culprit is likely an amalgamation of factors working naturally and unintentionally in concert to create an environment that discourages home sales.

What's truly intriguing is that these varied explanations and justifications can mostly be segmented according to two distinct conceptual groupings:

• people don't want to buy homes
• people can't buy homes

In other words, are buyers consciously sitting on the sidelines because they believe that now is not a good time to buy? Or are they trying to get in the fray but can't because something is holding them back against their will, like tightened lending standards? Below are some suggested explanations for buyer inactivity, grouped accordingly.

The million dollar question: is there one segment that feels like it explains the situation more than the other? Do people just not want to buy houses? Or do people want to but can't? Or is it a combination of the two? What do you think? We're looking for input from the broader real estate community here.

The people who may have the most to say about this would be those in the mortgage community. Has there been an increase in the number of applicants who don't qualify to purchase? Can these consumers account for the lion's share of the drop in sales or not?

Sometimes blogs are valuable not for providing answers, but for asking questions. Hopefully this is an example.