Property Values to Rise in 2013

If you’re looking to buy a house in the near future you’ve got cause to rejoice – unfortunately, for those looking to sell homes or who are worried about the value of their property, the news is a little less pleasing.  According to the Case-Schiller Index (a nationally recognized index that catalogs the value of property and homes), the news looks bleak for those who are hoping that their property values will rise in the immediate future.

Home prices are still falling all across the United States, and right now the actual value of property is at an eleven-year low.  From December of 2010 until January of 2011, home prices managed to drop in 19 cities across the country.  Eleven of these cities are at their lowest property values since the housing bust in 2006 and 2007.  The cities hit the hardest include Atlanta, Las Vegas, Detroit, and Cleveland – housing prices in these areas of the country are lower than where they were in January of 2000.  The news doesn’t get any better from there: the index has fallen for the sixth straight month.  Across the entire Untied States, home values are price dated before 2003.  In most metropolitan areas that the index covers, values have universally fallen – the only exception to this is the Washington D.C. area, where values have risen by an unimpressive 0.1 percent.

Essentially, there’s a lot of doom and gloom about when it comes to the housing market, if the ever-increasing amount of foreclosure signs going up in neighborhoods across the country wasn’t enough of a tip off.  While the fact that the housing market is nowhere near what it used to be his hardly news, the question everybody is asking might be: when can we expect a change?

Just as housing bubbles can’t last forever, neither can housing slumps, right?  At some point, the market has to pick up, as surely as it had to fall.

The current date that experts are forecasting?  2013.  The industry’s analysts are predicting that housing prices will eventually rise over the next couple of years  – and the fact that the values of property are still falling doesn’t necessarily mean that things are getting worse.  In fact, most analysts say that the next couple of years are the equivalent to the last bit of poison running out of the system – the worst is over and the aftereffects will simply need a couple of years to work themselves out.

While it’s good that the situation appears to be improving, there’s only one bit of advice for those who would like to see their property values rise from rock bottom – hang in there!