Consumer Unconfidence: Making Hay In A Buyer's Market

One of the sites that I follow is Gallup.  I find their polls quite interesting and a good way to take the temperature of public sentiment on a variety of topics.  One of the topics related to my real estate business is the consumer confidence index.  I have reproduced one of Gallup's charts and adjusted it with a 6 day moving average trend line:

 
My gut feel lately was that the market has changed since June.  Buyer behavior has changed and seller's are increasing in their motivation in general.  Gallup's data here illustrates what my gut had been telling me.  We have had a significant move down in consumer confidence. 

The last time confidence was this low was in 2008 and 2009.  Interestingly, I closed several seller finance transactions during that period.  Similarly, I just closed a seller finance real estate transaction within the last couple of weeks.  Clearly, this shift in consumer confidence changes the way we conduct business.