The Washington Post has an interesting article on the housing outlook. Here are a few exceprts:
In a report last month, Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies singled out high joblessness as “one of the biggest drags” on the market. Based on past downturns, the report concluded that job growth is highly correlated to a sustained housing recovery, even more so than falling mortgage interest rates.
Many housing analysts are rethinking their predictions for the market’s performance for the year. More than half of the 106 economists and analysts surveyed by Macromarkets in June said they expect a dip in home prices; that’s up from 40 percent in May.
“The tax credit was like a Band-Aid over the housing market,” said Mark Vitner, a senior economist at Wells Fargo Securities. “Now that the Band-Aid has been ripped off, we’ve found that the wound has not quite yet healed.”
File: Its all about jobs.
