According to the latest forecast by the National Association of REALTORS®, existing home sales are expected to hold steady as indicated by pending sales activity, and then rise later in the year and continue to improve in 2009.
Lawrence Yun, NARs chief economist explains that there is a pull and tug exerting itself on the real estate market.
“On the one hand, we have a pent-up demand from the four million jobs added to our economy over the past two years of sales decline,” he says. “On the other, consumers continue to wait for additional signs of market stabilization. There are more people with financial capacity now than in 2005, but many are trying to market-time their purchase. As a result, the exact timing and the strength of a home sales recovery is a bit uncertain. A meaningful recovery in existing home sales could occur as early as this spring, or it may be further delayed toward late 2008.”
–Lawrence Yun, NAR chief economist
This is more exciting news for the housing market in 2008 and 2009. We have already been seeing these trends in the North Tarrant and North Dallas real estate market and it’s nice to see more data confirming that these trends are here to stay despite the negative media.
Oh, something else that the media will not mention is that the “Pending Home Sales Index” or PHSI rose 2.3 percent in November (sorry, data analysis is always delayed, go figure). More market improvement in our future? It sure looks like it.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 at 9:24 am and is filed under Housing Market, Real Estate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.