I keep reading about how the real estate market has changed. It's either "slowed, leveled-off, in a trough, retreated, plunged, plummeted, collapsed, corrected, contracted or returned to normal," depending upon who wrote the story.

More accurately, what has occurred is that the easy surplus of transactions over the last few years that fed the hopes and dreams, if not the mouths of a crush of new licensees, has abated.

The market hasn't changed; it has moved on. And it certainly hasn't returned to normal and never will. There isn't any such thing as a normal real estate market because each market is new and different and unique to now, and driven by not one event but several, some of which never repeat themselves.

Take for example the past five years. Was that a "buying frenzy" as bubble-heads assert? Or, was it a dynamic period resulting from the intersection of real estate favorable circumstances?

Often the events that shape the present take place well in advance of the visible result. Everyone knows we just had a real estate boom, but few people seem to understand why. Some pundits have gone so far as to argue that the run-up in housing prices was the 21st century equivalent of Holland's infamous "Tulip-Mania."

What writers and academics don't seem to understand is that nobody wants to spend so much to buy a house. There is not only strong resistance to rising prices, but also the very real limit placed on that price by issues of affordability.

This is evidenced by the astonishing pent-up anger that is being expressed in real estate blogs. Fueled by impatience and wishful thinking, these advocates of the bubble theory have disparaged brokers, lenders, builders, and even the buyers themselves for locking them out of the market. People aren't livid about the cost of Cadillacs.

When you understand how we got here it's all perfectly reasonable and logical. Powerful forces are at work here. The circumstances that produced these forces are actually accelerating.

Return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear.

1978 -- the last "normal" year. Housing was generally affordable and interest rates were 9.5 percent. Between 1980 and 1981, sales plummeted as interest rates topped 16.5 percent. Nothing normal about that. Homes sat on the market for months and many were foreclosed.

Given those circumstances, many practitioners left the business as it seemed impossible to find a way around such an obstacle. Those of us who stuck it out invented a little wrinkle that was quickly maligned and eventually outlawed. "Creative financing" they called it back in the day. Risky, they said. An evil concoction that combined nose thumbing at the existing lender with sellers financing parts of their own transactions. Big banks just loved it. Not!

A loophole in California law allowed a buyer to "take subject to" existing financing without any approval from the lender. Just start making the payments. But the lower interest loans were on properties that had about doubled in value and that left an often sizable gap to be bridged. A higher interest second would be obtained for part of the financing and the seller would carry a reasonable third trust deed for the balance. We would wind up with a "blended" rate equivalent to 11 or 12 percent.

Soon it became apparent that the other advantage was that the buyer didn't need to put twenty percent down, overcoming yet another obstacle in California.

1983 -- the market began to improve dramatically as adjustable rate mortgages began to appear and interest rates began to decline. But for the next seven years, rates would not fall below 10 percent. Yet year after year more homes, both new and resale were being sold.

1988 -- new home sales hit a record 675,000 units while existing homes sales peaked at 3,512,000.

1991 -- new home sales bottomed out at 507,000 while resale closings fell to 3,186,000 units.

1993 -- locally this was not a time of optimism within the real estate industry. But as I looked into the future, I realized that the events preceding the next boom were already underway, and I published my analysis in April in which I predicted the coming boom.

1994 -- Boomers are in their peak family-forming years and should have been flooding the market. Instead the tail end of a brutal recession spooked many potential homebuyers into remaining renters. Pent up demand was building below the surface and as circumstances improved, one by one these over-ripe candidates came off the fence to join the competition for a shrinking inventory.

1997 -- Taxpayer Relief Act radically changed capital gains treatment on profits made on the sale of a personal residence. This began to impact the second home market as well as underscore the financial benefits of home ownership.

1999 -- the appreciation cycle began. Boomers were returning to the market to find limited choices and shortages began to develop in some areas. Boomers will continue to be first time buyers for another decade. Both generations X and Y have had an impact on the market over the last five years and that will continue to grow.

Builders responded, selling a record 885,000 homes in 1998 and 881,000 in 1999.

2000 -- "Dotcom" crash causes corresponding slow down in both new and resale housing.

2001 -- Demand of all types, deferred, pent-up, contemporary, investor refugees from the stock market and accelerated demand combine to overwhelm inventory in many communities.

During the prior decade, builders all but abandoned condominium construction because of rampant defect litigation. The result was that overtime, a smaller percentage of resales would occur at lower prices because that inventory was never built.

And while all of that was unfolding, an evolution in real estate finance was taking place which would make homeownership possible for more people. Today there is a loan for anyone who is responsible with money and has a decent job. That alone is worthy of a moment of pause.

I know that some of you are prone to thinking that many of these new loan types are dangerous to borrowers and, frankly, I think that's nonsense.

I'm from the old school. Give a man a chance, even a desperately slim chance, and see if he can make it. Most will find a way. The idea of a starter loan or a temporary loan is a solid one. The problem is that financing is an area where the industry has done a poor job of educating the consumer.

Factor in historically low interest rates and the explosion of attention that has surrounded the boom and it is easy to explain the events of the last few years.

Along the way real estate development has become more expensive as easy to develop land has disappeared and what remains often has significant challenges.

Material costs have increased, infrastructure costs have increased, labor costs have increased, and the bottom line is that, in many markets, builders are abandoning plans because the consumer cannot afford what it costs to build.

And if they cannot build them for less, the gains of most real estate owners are well protected. These are important talking points to share with everyone you meet.

The economy is solid if not spectacular when compared to historical norms.

The wild card for the next few months will be the number of unoccupied homes in some regions. Will that result in significant declines in value? My bet is that it won't go deep and it won't last long.

For some real estate practitioners, 2007 will go down as their best year ever. That will be entirely determined by what they do, not what the so-called market does.

If you can kick aside a few common misperceptions about the real estate business and start doing the right things in the right way, this will be your best year ever.

First, very few people actually succeed for any length of time in real estate. By almost any analysis, we have an extreme surplus of practitioners that cannot be supported by the volume of business. Eighty percent must fail because there is no business for them to do.

But they will try. Desperately. And that desperation will spill over into someone's real estate experience. Desperation is a powerful motivator, but it will not produce any more business than the natural ebb and flow of life within a community.

So understand this well. The vast majority of real estate transactions occur because of routine, predictable life events, and as a result, there is always a minimum baseline of activity that is oblivious to market conditions. Birth, death, divorce, job transfer, promotion in a good economy, lay-off in a weak economy, injury, illness, or shifting equity as part of a long term plan are among the chief reasons why real estate activity occurs.

Factors like the economy or interests rates may accelerate or delay action. The reasons may be real -- not financially strong enough, or perceptual, such as thinking this is a bad time to buy, sell or borrow.

A study of buyers and sellers of real estate determined that there exists a protracted consideration period, ranging from 5 months to five years, in which they were said to be "collecting experiences" prior to acting.

If a light didn't just go on for you, it should have. Your business isn't a quest for a warm lead, your business is everyone. Your job is to facilitate the "experience collecting" process.

Let's get a couple more things straight. Your main business objective, no matter what anyone says, is to build a listing portfolio. I don't care how long they take to sell, most will sell. Sellers will be anxious. Deal with it. If you were helping them collect experiences along the way, you would assume they would have priced it correctly and it will sell.

Having a listing portfolio gives you real security and an ongoing, meaningful objective for your business. If you have well priced listings, you will attract the most qualified buyers and create lending opportunities.

How you ask? By building a referral based business. Leads must be generated, sold, and closed. Referrals come to you predetermined to do business with you.

With email, instant messaging, and texting, word-of-mouth is more powerful than ever, and people will talk about you if you make a difference in their lives.

People are horribly misinformed about real estate. And, when you break it down for them, they are amazed and enthusiastic. They can see how proper planning in their own lives will allow them to take advantage of leverage and tax free profits to build an estate.

In that regard, the only timing that is important is the timing of predictable life events. The market doesn't matter. When people ask me, "When is the best time to buy real estate?" I always say, "When someone will lend you most, if not all, of the money to buy it."

No one ever got hurt buying real estate at the wrong time. They have been hurt when forced to sell at the wrong time.

This year a baseline of real estate needs must be met. And there will be discretionary buyers as well. What has changed is the customer. Gone from the market are the speculators, but the investors remain. Gone are the starry-eyed, first-time buyers who accelerated their timeline reasoning that rising prices and rising interest rates would make buying more difficult in the future.

And screened from the view of most practitioners are all of those homeowners sitting on equity with no one to show them how to redeploy that equity. Many older home owners stay put because they wrongly believe they will face large capital gain taxes. They should be in the marketplace, but probably won't be because they are ill-informed.

Defaults, short sales, foreclosures, and R.E.O properties will be a strong part of the market. These are listings that must be sold.

The market today is as filled with opportunity for knowledgeable professionals as ever. But it's a different market. One that has moved on. What's different this time? Great gobs of dormant cash sitting idle in the homes of ill-informed consumers.

If you make it your mission to create informed consumers who are fully aware of their options, then the market won't matter to them or you.