By Scott Van Voorhis

How far would you go to sell your home?

Yes, the home buyer tax credit is gone, foreclosures are still soaring and sales are falling again. But if you are a buyer determined to crack the perpetually overpriced Greater Boston real estate market, this litany of woe could present an opportunity or two.

That is if you are ready to ditch the rule book and turn conventional wisdom on its head.

For starters, don’t kick yourself over missing out on the $8,000 home buyer tax credit.

Pat yourself on the shoulder instead.

OK, I know that sounds nuts, but it’s not.

The federal tax credit did much more for sellers than for buyers – in fact it should have been called the Federal Home Seller Protection Act.

It drew lots of first-timers into the market, who tripped all over each other as they scrambled to put properties under agreement by April 30th in order to claim their $8,000 credit.

Given, as you might have noticed, there just aren’t that many true starter homes out there in the Boston suburbs, that sparked bidding wars for modest properties.

But that turned out to be a fool’s game.

Sure, the winners got their $8,000 tax credit – but at the cost of shelling out $10,000 or $20,000 more than they would have had paid otherwise without all that government money floating around.

Guess what? Those bidding wars, and a lot of those buyers that were flooding the open houses vanished when the clock struck midnight on April 30th.

So if you are a buyer, a lot of your competition is now gone, and sellers know it.

Just check out the latest stats from Trulia.com, which show a surge in price reductions since May 1st by suddenly anxious buyers.

But to turn these market trends to your advantage, you need to do your homework.

Not all sellers are equally desperate – it’s worth finding out whether the house you are looking at was recently reduced in price. Better yet, whether there were multiple price reductions – or even a deal that fell through after the home buyer tax credit expired.

It’s also worth checking out local foreclosure stats as well and even hunting for short sale opportunities.

OK, this may sound like going to extremes.

Still, new home construction went out of fashion in Greater Boston 25 years ago, and it may never come back.

There is no massive overhang of new, unsold homes and subdivisions sitting out there, ready to be scooped up for bargain prices.

And homeowners with the best properties who don’t have to sell right now probably aren’t.

That means if you want to find a deal, you’ve got to work for it.

First, foreclosures do present an opportunity, though not necessarily in the way you might think.

Investors armed with cash often snap up the best homes and condos at foreclosure auctions.

Still, there are other ways to make foreclosures work for you. A sharp increase in distressed properties in a particular town or neighborhood is likely to put downward pressure on prices or other homes in the area, giving buyers a bit more leverage.

A number of suburban towns have seen a spike in foreclosure activity over the past year, including Weymouth, Plymouth and Stoughton, among others.

You don’t want to buy into a neighborhood with boarded up homes, certainly, but a little bit of distress can loosen up prices.

There are also short sales. Many homes never get as far as a foreclosure auction. The owners manage to sell them for less than what they owe on the mortgage through what is called a short sale.

It has traditionally been a nightmare of a process, with even determined buyers questioning their sanity after months of delays and balking and mixed signals by lenders. Banks, which stand to lose money, have not been big fans of short sales.

However, the federal government has stepped in, laying down new rules to speed up the short sale process make it less of an agonizing waiting game.

The new rules, in turn, could lead to another 2,000 homes hitting the market in the Greater Boston area, according to one recent estimate. That would be a 4 percent jump in inventory

Maybe it’s not the same as 2,000 newly built homes hitting the market, but here in Greater Boston, this may be the closest we will ever get to that.