The news is out in real estate circles: Here come the lowballers! In real estate terminology, a lowballer is a potential buyer who offers significantly less than the sale price of a home. In other words, the guy who drinks your milkshake. Or maybe just a thrifty consumer.

This Sunday's New York Times had an interesting article about how lowballing is now becoming a popular buying strategy in the New York area. As the piece makes clear, this shocks and offends some homeowners, who apparently have a hard time believing that their real estate isn't worth as much as they thought it was.

As I wrote last week, our entire national conversation about real estate rests on the foolish assumption that rising home values are good for everyone. They're not — only for people who own homes. (The same goes for stocks.) And this is only the beginning of how the emotions people invest in their homes distort their feelings about the money they've invested in them.

Unlike any other investment available to the average person, real estate has an everyday use — as a place to live. Stocks aren't good for much, at least in small amounts, and commodities are almost always seen in the abstract: If you invest in oil, no one actually sends you a barrel of the stuff. Real estate is also the only investment that most people can make on a leveraged basis. Most people buy a home by putting down 20 percent in cash — less in recent years — and paying off the rest over time. Hedge funds and wealthy investors do that with stocks — to the current regret of our entire economy — but the average person can't.

In other words, when it comes to the most important investment most people ever make, logic goes out the window. This is a bad thing. It also explains the prevailing attitude toward lowballers, who could be seen as questioning the value of one's family nest. More importantly, it explains why the volume of real estate transactions is so far down. Many people don't want to sell their house for less than they paid — even in a market that's going down — because a relative or TV commentator told them that home values always rise. So they reject reasonable offers in the hopes that a better one will come along. Sometimes it does, sometimes not. In the meantime, the market slows to a crawl. Sooner or later, it will keep going down.

In case you're curious, I have no advice on how or when to sell your home — if I could predict the future, you'd have to pay to read this. But I can offer two important pieces of advice. First, buy a home where you'll be able to create happy memories that you can't put a price on. Second, remember that those memories won't raise your sale price one bit.