Today is my last day writing for Open House as I move on to a new adventure. Thank you to everyone who read and contributed to the blog in the past many months.

Please be kind to the business staffers who will do their best to continue to bring you South Sound real estate news and musings.

I often hear and read about folks trying to find the ever-elusive bottom of today’s real estate market, particularly when it comes to sinking median home prices. Pierce County’s median home price has declined year-over-year 10 of the last 11 months to $255,000 in July, according to the Northwest Multiple Listing Service.

Some see a bottom in a price that’s stayed essentially flat for most of 2008, though dipping a bit recently, from $260,000 in January to last month’s $255,000. My response: Aren’t prices supposed to be rising during the spring and summer, the hottest sales months of the year?

A Keller Williams agent told me last week we’re halfway through an 18-month down market. A Parkside Realty agent told me this week recovery won’t come until 2011. Which seems awfully far off.

Then I saw a Prashant Gopal BusinessWeek blog post about others seeking the bottom. Here's an excerpt:

It’s easy to call a bottom to the housing slump. The tough part is getting the timing right.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has made many such predictions. “All the signs I look at” show “the housing market is at or near the bottom,” Paulson said in April 2007, a few months before the credit crunch hit.

Just last month Barron’s declared that “Real-Estate Rout May Be Short-Lived.” The evidence: home prices were moving closer to incomes in high-priced markets, existing homes sales had improved somewhat and inventories of unsold homes had dipped slightly. The critics responded swiftly: “During the Bull Market of the ’90s, I used to read Barron’s for their hard edged, skeptical look at many of the excesses on Wall Street, wrote Barry Ritholtz, of The Big Picture blog. “During the past 5 years or so, that skepticism seems to be fading… The latest evidence of this is the wrong headed cover story on Housing.”

Now, a Bloomberg article is suggesting that California might be the first state to hit bottom. The article points out that sales are rising across the state for three consecutive months starting in April. And four in 10 sales were sales of foreclosed homes.

What are your thoughts, predictions?