Is the housing market on the Highlands Cashiers Plateau near bottom??

Here is a great article I found about the housing market. Remember the the Cashiers Highlands market is always a bit ahead of the curve. I hope you enjoy.....



Bottoms Near in Housing Market

By Mike ColpittsEditor

The big question everyone seems to be asking these days is when will the bottom of the housing market hit? The toughest aspect of forecasting any real estate or financial market for that matter is this proverbial age-old question.
The bottom of the real estate market will hit the over-whelming majority of U.S. housing markets beginning in mid-2009 and slowly move across the country through mid-2010, according to the newly issued Housing Predictor forecast. The bottoms for local housing markets won't happen all at once. Instead, they'll occur in stages and slowly spread in domino fashion across the country from one market to another.
The majority of local housing markets are still working through their downturns and won't see lower pricing levels flatten until sometime in 2009, close to what we forecast last April.
In April we also forecast an up tick in home sales in many markets across the country, which developed during late summer as a result of the epidemic of foreclosures. Pent up demand played a part, and now we project lower interest rates will combine to trigger an increase in home sales by late spring, 2009.
The massive $700-billion plus bailout, efforts by special interest groups to limit the number of foreclosures and interest rate cuts will all be part of the effort to stabilize the housing market. Additional efforts by the Fed and Treasury will also act to aid the marketplace.
But the real question consumers might be more concerned about these days is just how long it will take for improving market conditions to develop in the overall housing market. Housing Predictor analysts have examined our data to determine just how many years it will take for the market to show an overall sign of improvement, and at this point in the economic cycle we just aren't sure of how many years it will take for conditions to improve. Our best guess is that that conditions might begin to show overall economic enhancements sometime by 2011.
Although still in housing depressions, markets in California, Florida, Ohio, Indiana and Michigan are showing signs that some markets are nearing their bottoms, despite many of these areas being the hardest hit in the real estate crisis.
The Housing Predictor forecast is based on studies of more than 250 markets regularly tracked by researchers.
As forecast by Housing Predictor, the national mortgage crisis triggered by Wall Street bankers working in conjunction with mortgage companies to sell loans as securities on Wall Street seized credit markets around the globe, to become the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
As government efforts across the world increase to stabilize nation's economies, efforts to stabilize housing markets should develop into improving overall economic conditions in coming months and at least return local housing markets to be more attractive to real estate buyers.

For more information on the Cashiers or Highlands markets, contact Mathew S. Kowal with The Blue Ridge Summit Group at 828-743-7077 or 404-394-7144