These days, we have to take our good news where we can find it. So which of today’s major stories do we focus on: the decline of existing home sales to a nine-year low, the first annual price decline on single family homes in 40 years, or the decline of mortgage rates to their lowest level in four years?

Given the seemingly endless stream of negative numbers we’ve discussed here, the interest rate news is welcome relief. Maybe it’s not worthy of a ticker tape parade, but it may well help the market in several ways:

The number that caught my eye in The New York Times was $9.8 billion. But that staggering sum – the loss recorded by Citigroup – was just the start of the bad news. The fine print was a lot worse.

We all know the cause: Subprime. But if only it had been so good as the headline!

The real number was $22.2 billion – the amount Citigroup wrote off in “soured mortgage-related investments and bad loans.”

Let’s try to get our arms around these numbers by thinking not in terms of dollars, but of seconds. A second goes by pretty quickly, right? A few hundred have ticked by since I started writing this item. So intuition might tell you that any fifth grader would have lived at least a couple billion seconds.

“The world has changed quite drastically – and our view of the world has changed quite drastically.”

I found that stunning statement buried deep in a news story about the arcane maneuverings that exposed the world’s largest investment companies to massive losses in what we now know as the subprime crisis. It came from a director of one of the world’s biggest bond rating services – the people who are supposed to keep everybody rooted in reality.

Not so long ago, real estate was a favorite landing spot for all kinds of people who had no other place to go.

When corporate downsizing created thousands of displaced managers and executives, many enrolled in the many real estate courses offered by agencies in virtually every city. For the agencies offering the courses, it’s a “can’t lose” proposition. The courses generate some revenue, and some of the graduates will become successful professionals for the company.

Every day, all over the country, real estate appraisers dutifully search county records for comps and write their reports, which directly or indirectly influence a whole range of decisions for buyers, sellers, lenders and even tax assessors.

But as developers turn increasingly to incentives to get their properties sold, we have to face up to the possibility that the entire appraisal system could become distorted.

Let’s say a developer sells a home or condominium for the nominal price of $200,000 after enticing the buyer with the offer of a free $30,000 car. The price goes in the county records as $200,000, but the real price is $170,000.

For a while now, I’ve been suggesting that the current oversupply of homes won’t go away until prices reach a level buyers are prepared to pay. Based on the latest Commerce Department data on new homes, it seems builders are reaching that conclusion as well.

The median price of new houses sold in October was $217,800 – a whopping 8.6 percent decrease from September’s $238,400. Helping feed this was a nice jump in the number of homes in the $150,000-$199,999 range. In September, homes in that category made up only 18 percent of the total; in October, that jumped to 27 percent.

With this week’s news that home prices fell 4.5 percent in the third quarter, a lot of people with real estate to sell have to make some tough decisions. Do they cut their asking price enough to get a contract, or do they hold out for the inevitable recovery?

The big question is, how long will they have to wait? Perhaps the best way to answer that question is to look at the last period in which home prices began to fall, as measured by the widely followed S&P/Case-Shiller index of home prices.

I’m going to advance a notion that some people may find controversial, but I believe it to the bottom of my soul: Business is about relationships. Let’s say you’re a local banker getting ready to lend money to Frank. You know you’re going to see him at church, at the Kiwanis Club and at the Chamber of Commerce meeting. If you sell him something that doesn’t work for him, those encounters will become very uncomfortable.

When the job of selling mortgages got separated from the jobs of underwriting and servicing those loans, it was just a matter of time until we faced a crisis.

Thirteen months ago, I wrote about the sad state of builder confidence as reflected in the NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index, which had sunk all the way to 30 -- its most pessimistic level since the early 1990s.

I used some pretty strong language, suggesting that the slump was “here to stay” and that there was “nowhere to hide.”

When people start running out of patience with a sluggish market, they get creative. When they get desperate, they sometimes get downright radical.

That’s not altogether a bad thing.

One of the toughest jobs I know of is playing pro baseball in August. It's hot, everybody's starting to talk about football, crowds dwindle and the excitement of a pennant run is weeks away. But greatness isn't defined only in those magical days of October when the world's attention turns back to baseball for a week or two. Because the ones who slack off when it's too hot or too depressing won't be playing in the World Series.

That's the difference between a star and a wannabe.

Instead of moaning about how hard it is to sell property, let's view the current marketplace as an opportunity for the very best professionals to shine.

Paul McCartney has a hit CD, a red-hot Vegas show and millions of new fans. It isn't about great music. It's about a series of shrewd marketing moves that can teach us to sell more real estate.

In today's real estate markets, we're feeling the rumbles of an earthquake of sorts. A series of shocks, actually. And how much we feel them depends largely on where we are. If we're on the ground that's shaking, we can't escape them, no matter how big we are. But if you're in one of the areas where the glut is worst and the demand weakest, you can take a page out of Seattle's playbook to survive and emerge stronger than ever.

It's not uncommon in some markets to see houses selling for 20 percent less than they were a couple of years ago. So let's say you're considering the purchase of a home that was selling for $2 million during the bubble, and now you can buy it for $1.6 million. The guy who bought when real estate looked like a "can't miss" investment lost 20 percent. (For comparison purposes, the S&P 500 is up about 23 percent since 2002 ' not counting dividends!) But eventually, that home will sell for $2 million again, and more. The person smart enough to realize that and buy it now for $1.6 million will enjoy an increase of 25 percent just by holding it until it returns to its previous value.

It seems to be a quirk of human nature that we assume the current trend will continue forever. Ironically, it never does. Nobody can predict when things will bottom out. All we can do is decide whether we're willing to own a property at its current price.

As I have noted recently, much of the current sluggishness in residential real estate results from the gap between high asking prices and the prices buyers are actually willing to pay. So when I saw the latest Commerce figures, I looked more closely to see whether the sales jump reflected increased seller flexibility.

The short answer is, probably not.

Certainly, it's good to see some positive sales numbers, but I don't see any evidence that we've broken the pricing standoff at the higher end of the market where my firm operates.

We've all spent a lot of time lately talking about the oversupply of properties in previously overheated markets, and about the difficulty of getting property sold in the current environment. But it's good to remember that there's one way to be certain of a sale no matter what's going on around you.

Sell at the market.

The turmoil in today's real estate markets rivals that of the software industries. Hardly anything is being left untouched. Discount brokers are pressuring margins and taking customers. Online services like Zillow are threatening the old MLS structure. Classified ads are taking a back seat to online advertising. Instead of three or four big players, there are thousands, and a lot of people think we have too many real estate agents and brokers.

Speculators from all over the United States decided to jump into the game of buying and flipping condos and homes because they saw other people doing it. They heard the stories of easy money and concluded it was a no-brainer that they could walk away with bags of cash.

But it doesn't work that way, because of a principle statisticians call "reversion to the mean." In short, it means that when practically anything ' from pork belly prices to bank robberies ' gets too far out of whack, it tilts back toward whatever passes for normal. The more overheated a market becomes, the more dangerous it is.

Sometimes the best answer is to leave the guessing to the losers and "revert to your own mean." By that, I don't mean you turn away from opportunities, but rather that you remember what you do best and pursue your success in niches you understand.

UCLA basketball coach John Wooden started every season with a sock.

At the first practice, he'd gather the entire team around and teach them ' step by step ' how to put on their socks and lace up their shoes. Wooden's lesson was that you can't be a champion without attending to the details.

The last time we had this bad an oversupply, nobody had ever heard of the World Wide Web, because the first browser wouldn't be invented for another three years. At the time, we were coming off a recession, and 30-year fixed mortgage rates were pushing 9.5 percent.

The really scary thing is that the inventories are actually a lot worse than they appear.

We've all heard the old saying that you only get one chance to make a great first impression. And for most of us who market real estate, that first impression often occurs over the phone.

Yet, many real estate professionals never give any thought to how they come across. I've seen (and heard) mistakes that make me shudder, including kids screaming in the background, bad connections, balky Bluetooths and bad manners.

The unraveling of the subprime mortgage market couldn't come at a worse time for the residential housing industry, no matter what kind of property you're selling. With less money chasing more homes, there's only one likely outcome: lower prices.

The huge inventories of homes and condominiums tell me that the oversupply won't resolve itself until buyers and sellers get together on redefined prices that reflect true market values.

If you sell high-end real estate, you'd better realize you're in the image business. I'm not talking about how you dress, or what kind of car you drive. Those are part of it, but your image touches virtually every aspect of your work life. I've seen people who dress impeccably, drive luxury cars and work in high-rent offices -- only to blow the whole thing with bad grammar, crude speech habits or frivolous email "stationery" with pink flowers and bizarre typefaces.