The old rules of real estate said (for many years), “buy it now, it will be gone tomorrow.”

Those rules appear to be making a comeback; see the following article in Dataquick,  here
(if you don’t read Dataquick’s news, you should; they are quite reliable, if not always “up to date” (they deal only in closed listings, which means that the trends they follow have already happened; if you follow pending sales, you find the trends when they are happening.  There is no reliable way to follow “pendings,” as they are called, except to ask a Realtor in the target area.