REAL ESTATE MYTHS | CEDAR & STONE REALTY GROUP | MAY 2026

The Most Expensive Sentence in Real Estate

In twelve years of working with buyers and sellers in the Portland metro, I have heard one sentence cost people more money than almost anything else.

It goes like this: I'm going to wait until the market is better.

It sounds reasonable. Prudent, even. Why buy now when rates might drop? Why sell now when prices might go up? Why make a move until conditions feel more certain?

Here's the problem. Conditions never feel certain. The market is never obviously, unambiguously perfect. There is always a reason to wait — and the people who wait for the reason to disappear are often still waiting years later, having watched the window they thought they were saving themselves for close quietly behind them.

I watched buyers in 2019 decide to wait because the market felt too hot. Then 2020 happened, and they were waiting for a different reason. By 2022, the homes they'd been eyeing had appreciated by $150,000 and rates had moved sharply. The waiting hadn't protected them. It had cost them — in equity they didn't build, in appreciation they didn't capture, in a home they didn't get to live in.

I'm not saying the timing of a real estate decision doesn't matter at all. Life circumstances matter enormously. Job stability, down payment readiness, family situation — these are real inputs to a real decision, and they should be. But "the market doesn't feel right" is almost never the actual reason people wait. It's the reason that sounds responsible. The actual reason is usually uncertainty. And uncertainty doesn't go away by waiting. It just changes shape.

The buyers who do best in this market are not the ones who timed it perfectly. They're the ones who bought when they were financially ready and held on. Time in the market, every single time, beats timing the market.

Friday's post goes deep on this myth and four others that are quietly shaping — and sometimes derailing — real estate decisions all over the Portland metro. Worth a read before you make any big moves.

— Stacey Cedar & Stone Realty Group | Serving the Portland Metro & Southwest Washington