Selling or buying a home is more than a financial transaction. It’s a major life event, and often the gateway to a significant transition: starting a family, retiring, transferring jobs, moving closer to relatives.

With the real estate market softening and mortgages becoming harder to get, many home buyers and sellers are stymied, unable to progress with their plans because they cannot get their deals done.

In the Bay Area, sales volume has fallen to the lowest level in 12 years. Although prices in certain higher-end communities are holding steady, they are decreasing in neighborhoods with a large number of new or entry-level homes. Houses are lingering on the market much longer.

But the numbers don’t tell the underlying stories of the countless individuals who need to buy or sell a house to get on with their lives.

For sellers, a home that does not attract bids means they are unable to move. There is always the option of dropping the price, which works best for people who have owned their home a long time and built up substantial equity. But since home sellers need a new place to live, most need to extract maximum value from their house to buy their next one.

For buyers, the uncertainty of landing a mortgage has created another kind of limbo - particularly for first-timers who had hoped to move up from renting and onto the equity ladder. The reverberations of that inability can affect everything from commute times and apartment leases to the accumulation of wealth and the peace of mind surrounding homeownership.

As these stories of Bay Area home sellers and home buyers show, the mortgage meltdown and real estate slump have forced many people into a holding pattern, a frustrating situation with no end in sight.