The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times both published articles in the past six weeks stating that the housing market has reached a bottom. But hold on for just a minute… It seems that not everyone believes it.
Even Yale professor Robert Shiller, co-founder of the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index, admits to being a little bit skeptical. In fact, he even told Fox Business last week that he's not entirely convinced that a bottom has been reached yet.
“It’s possible, but I’m not confident. This is partly seasonal,” Shiller said regarding the recent rise in home prices that have been documented over the past few months.
Only one thing is certain when it comes to economics: there is no certainty as to when an economic cycle has bottomed out until it’s already past. This is especially true in real estate — one of the biggest driving forces behind our national economy.
There are many complicated ways to analyze the market conditions in your local area, enough to confuse and boggle the novice investor’s mind. However, you can keep things simple by using our “MAD” method. This means paying attention to three important factors and noting whether they’re going up or down:
One crisp fall Sunday afternoon under bright blue skies, my wife and I visited five homes up for sale. We remembered them by their street names: Big Acre, Blue Silo, Pontiac, Prairie Rose and Lamont. The lineup has a poetic ring to it, but the real music is the potential rates of return from owning them and renting them out.
I've spoken many times on my radio show about how fear is used to move us. Well, recently I spotted a great example. Just last week I wrote about how a mortgage “expert” was predicting a “
While homes prices continue to be on the decline, rent prices are actually on the rise and showed a 3 percent increase from January 2011 to January 2012, as opposed to home values, which dropped 4.6 percent during that same period, according to a recent Zillow Real Estate Market Report.
