Signs of a Housing Market Turnaround

Signs of a Housing Market Turnaround

Tighter credit is prolonging the seemingly everlasting slump in home sales, but a quarterly Wall Street Journal survey of 28 major metro areas shows that the surge in inventories of unsold homes is slowing.

The latest trends offer some hope for an eventual recovery in a U.S. housing market that generally has been cooling since mid-2005.  Even so, many economists and industry executives say that recovery will be very gradual and won't start before 2008 at the earliest, partly because more-stringent lending policies are keeping many potential buyers on the sidelines, while others are holding off in hopes of prices heading even lower.  Meanwhile, there is still a glut of homes on the market in much of the country.

House prices are likely to remain weak in many areas until inventories of unsold homes fall.  That process has begun in a few places where the number of homes listed for sale at the end of June was down 16% from a year earlier.  Some frustrated sellers who don't need to move have taken their homes off the market, which has also lowered inventory somewhat.

If you are in the homebuying mode as opposed to selling, now may be the most favorable time for you to begin looking, before things turn around and you say, "wish we had started this process sooner when conditions were more favorable to buyers…"  Contact us for a free consultation to find out if now is the best time for you to look at buying a home.