How are people finding good deals in this market?

[Michael Bell]

As I'm sure everyone knows, the housing market is pretty locked up right now. Inventory is low and sellers won't budge. I'm curious as to how this has affected everyone's local market. The market I'm working in is totally locked up. Transaction volume is basically non-existent. That being said it would appear on the surface that there's plenty of inventory, as there's tons of listings. However these listings are all totally unrealistic. In my area specifically most investment type property listings are properties that were purchased 1 to 2 years ago. In all cases the sellers are asking anywhere from 70% to %150 of what they paid for just a year or 2 ago. This is all despite the fact that they've made no improvements to the properties since acquiring them, and local property value indices only have about 15% appreciation for property values in the last 2 years for my area. Because the numbers are so far from making any sort of sense all these listings have just been sitting. It's becoming very obvious that this isn't a sellers or buyers market, but an attempted suckers rally. I was wondering if anyone has these same issues in their market, and how they've been able to skirt the mania and actually find real serious deals.