Homebuyers and owners looking for a real estate market rally in 2008 might have to wait a few months. Experts said it could take until late in the year or possibly 2009 for things to improve.
Both positive and negative indicators are present in Baltimore?s housing market right now, said Bill Cassidy, sales manager with Long and Foster Fells Point.
“The positive I?m hearing from numerous agents … is they see a buildup of buyers who are ?waiting until next year,? ” he said. “They?re waiting to winter this winter, either to sell or to buy. On the downside, it?s a buyer?s market of course, and one of the reasons is that sellers are stubborn.”
But an exact prediction is almost impossible to make, said Anirban Basu, president and CEO of Sage Policy Group, because a market change will be created by the human element.
“The key to all of this is something we can?t measure, which is buyer psychology,” Basu said. “At some point there has to be a critical mass of buyers who believe that we have reached the bottom of the market and that they need to act to take advantage of buyer?s market.”
That said, Basu believed it would be 2009 before that happened. Others foresaw at least a more reasonable year, if not a full recovery, coming.
“I think 2008 is going to be a more stable year,” said Cathy Werner, president of the Greater Baltimore Board of Realtors and a Realtor with Re/Max American Dreams in Perry Hall. “We?ve got to wait for the mortgage thing to play out, we?ve got to readjust to what happened.”
In the next few months, an uncertain market will keep investors and real estate professionals on edge, said Michael Anikeeff, chair of Johns Hopkins University?s Edward St. John Department of Real Estate.
“It?s kind of sad in a way, if we get into a recession people know what to do,” Anikeeff said. “It?s like if you get a cold, you know what to do. In this uncertainty it?s hard to make a decision.”
Anikeeff said a recovery would mean a return to what passes for a balanced state in the real estate market, not the big boom of earlier this decade.
“We?ve had just a phenomenal run,” he said. “I think it?s just unrealistic to expect us to get back to that.”
