Bimal and Pallavi Joshi are buying their first house. Good for them. More importantly, good for the rest of us, because they’re partly responsible for a recent uptick in the market. It’s a modest word, uptick, especially when we’re accustomed to words like surge and boom, but we’re living in modest times.

The Joshis are a financially stable couple in their late 40s with two kids. He’s a tax consultant with H&R Block; she’s a long-term care nurse. They might have bought a house years ago, with zero or five per cent down. But they’re not speculators or investors, and the boom market—when every passing month meant getting less house for more money—put them off. Several months into a quieter market, the Joshis are feeling more optimistic, huffing a little of what the British PM Gordon Brown calls the oxygen of confidence, the sort that can breathe life into a choking economy.

In a declining market, first-time buyers are key. We need people to buy entry-level homes so that those occupying them can trade up. In March, houses under $400,000 accounted for 73 per cent of sales. That’s up nearly three per cent over March of last year. Christine Cowern, an agent with RE/MAX Hallmark, says she’s busier than she was this time last year, and it’s mainly doing first-time deals. She thinks it’s a great time to be an entry-level buyer, but then, when was the last time you heard an agent say it wasn’t a good time to buy? The dif­ference here is that Cowern put her money where her sales spiel is. At age 36, seeing that rare conjunction of falling rates and prices, she just bought her first house, for $338,000, near Oakwood and St. Clair.

In truth, though interest rates and prices are down compared to 2008, they’re not down by much. The median house price in March 2008 was $326,000; this March, it was $317,500 (which is up $4,500 from March 2007). Five-year fixed-rate mortgages dropped less than two per cent on average during the same period. Financially, this makes very little difference to people like the Joshis. But confidence is about perception, not reality.

These virgin buyers, scooping up places in the under-$400,000 bracket, aren’t opportunists looking for awesome deals, and they’re not worried about values continuing to decline. Mostly in their mid-30s and older, they plan to stay in their new houses for a long time.

They won’t miraculously cure our ailing economy—we’ll need a little more job security for that. But the first-time buyer is the all-important catalyst. When a few of them take the plunge, that creates market optimism, which begets slight upticks in sales. As more people put their houses on the market to sell to the optimists, slight upticks become large upticks, and, well, you get the picture.