If you own real estate in New York, you have been no doubt telling yourself and anyone who would listen that prices here were not going to fall like they were in the rest of the country. Limited supply, increasing urbanization of the country, enduring appeal, tight co-op loan restrictions were probably among your reasons. And if you looked at rental or sale real estate ads for the city, where some studios rent for $4,000 a month or sell for $600,000, you would not worry about a downturn. But now some data suggests New York may not be totally immune.

The S&P/Case-Shiller Index out yesterday showed home prices in 20 major markets were down an average 15.3% from a year ago and 1.3% in the latest month of survey data, April. Yesterday the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise said that nationally home prices fell 0.8% in April and 4.8% over the last year. The Pacific region lost the most--down 2% in a month--and the east south central did best--up 0.9%.

Case-Shiller shows that New York peaked in June 2006 at 215.83 on their scale and has slid steadily ever since. The April number was 193.93 (up slightly from the month before.) But Case-Shiller looks at the whole metro area, all five boroughs, parts of Jersey, Connecticut, Westchester, Long Island and even a bit of Pennsylvania. When people think of New York prices, they think of Manhattan. Today The Real Estate Group of New York issued figures showing an uneven market that has been mostly stagnant all 2008. Across Manhattan non-doorman one-bedroom rental prices are down 4% to $2,859 for the last 12 months. (With a doorman it's up slightly. Two-bedrooms were down a little in both categories.) Of course, I'm a renter and prospective buyer, so I've been telling everyone prices will fall.

Earlier today, I took my four-year-old to her preschool picnic, one that they hold every year after the last day of school and right before the summer begins. And as I stood there, underneath a canopy of blue sky, watching mostly three and four-year-olds dashing about, scampering on playground equipment and burying each other in the sandbox, I began talking to the mother of one of my daughter's classmates.

Not long after we began talking, I learned that she is a home stager.

I find it both exhilarating and a little frightening that I can go through life perfectly happy and then one day discover that there's yet another profession I had no previous knowledge of. I'm just thankful I'm very happy in my chosen profession of freelance writer. I'm sure I'd be crafting a stern letter to my high school guidance counselor right now if I had left the picnic in a funk, thinking that home staging should have been my calling.

Although that would be a little unfair to my guidance counselor, who couldn't know what she didn't know. According to Wikipedia, home staging didn't really come into its own as a profession until the 1990s, when I was well out of high school.

And so in case any of you out there are like me and have no idea what a home stager is, let me enlighten you. They are the professionals who prepare a house for its close up when it's on the real estate market. In other words, if you're going to sell your house, the idea is that you really should have a home stager involved first. It's that home stager, even more than a realtor, that can really set the mood for the buyer by decorating the house with a certain "buy me, live here" flair.