Some people are predicting housing prices are bottoming out, others think housing prices will continue to fall for another year or two. If we had to bet, we’d lean toward a 2010 bottom.
Here are a couple of links related to this subject. A pessimistic view is found in this video. The argument on the pressures that should continue compressing housing prices over the next year are pretty compelling.
Here is a recent Reuters article with a similar view. Here are some quotes:
Existing home sales probably won’t reach pre-boom levels until the third quarter of 2010 and housing starts won’t surpass 1 million until 2011, a barrier last broken six decades ago, the economists said.
“There are very few V-shaped recoveries in the history of real estate, and this one is likely to be even slower because of the size of the bubble,” said Robert Shiller, the Yale University professor who, with economist Karl Case, created home price indexes in the 1980s now used by Standard & Poor’s.