"How long until we sell this place?"

That big "For Sale" sign is finally in your yard! You cleaned, painted, decluttered, spruced and perfected your home inside and out. You interviewed several agents, eventually deciding upon one that best fits your needs. After signing the listing agreement, your agent arranged for a home stager, virtual tour and professional photographs. And now your home is on the market and the sign is out front.

So how long does it take to sell a home? Of course, if any realtor could answer that question without it being an educated guess they would be the busiest (and wealthiest) realtor nationwide. But it is largely an educated guess, with the emphasis on "educated." By looking at comparable sales, market conditions (ex., absorption rate) and economic conditions (ex., financing types and availability) your agent should be able to give you a selling time frame.

However, the best sales barometer is your showing information. How often is your home being shown and what kind of feedback are you receiving from the potential buyer's agents? If you haven't had ANY showings in a month, then you have priced yourself out of the market. If your feedback routinely mentions the unsightly power lines, then you haven't priced your home appropriately to compensate for the negative feature.

But if you are getting consistent showings every 7 to 10 days, and your feedback are comments like "the floor plan didn't work" or "the home just didn't appeal to the buyers", then you are right where you need to be. You have to get the buyers in your home to sell. Having a home for sale without consistent showings is like having a store clerk ready to handle customers except the sign on the door says "closed." It usually takes quite a number of buyers viewing your home before the one shows up that falls in love with it.

Consistent showings (7 to 10 days) = reasonable selling time for your market. Pretty basic, and yet sellers (and their agents) will let weeks and months go by with no showings. How smart is that?

Must Read for All Americans

Whether you are a real estate agent or investor, politically conservative or liberal, economically savvy or ignorant of the rising cost of groceries, it is worth your time and effort to read "Aftershock" by Wiedemer, Wiedemer and Spitzer.

You don't have to be a financial genius to know our current economy is anything but robust. How did we get here and why? The authors of "Aftershock" answered those questions BEFORE there was any hint of trouble. In 2006, their first book, "America's Bubble Economy", predicted our current economic mess. If we had followed their advice back then, our investment portfolios would not have taken a beating but, instead, that money would have been reinvested (or cashed) before the stock and housing markets went down.

Great, right? A lot of good that does me now. Except, according to the authors, that was only Phase I. Phase II is on the horizon; the"aftershock" of that first crash.

For those who still have money to invest, "Aftershock" gives their assesment of the safest investments before our government debt and inflated dollar cause further damage to the economy. For those who live day to day and month to month, ignorance will not be bliss if the authors' gobal economic predictions come true.

It's not a fun read, but then this is not a "fun" economy. Do yourself a favor and read it anyway.