Friday, March 5, 2010

For anybody looking to buy or sell a home, there’s good news. Most Kansas real estate markets are on the rebound, according to this year's WSU housing forecast.

Stan Longhofer heads up WSU’s Center For Real Estate and devised the prediction process.

“This has been a very long and deep recession, there's no question about it,” Longhofer said. “We're not in a gang buster economy right now, and this is not a housing market that's going full steam. But we have seen the turn around point.”

Longhofer predicts Wichita will see a 5.1% increase in home sales this year. The state as a whole will see an estimated 7.3% increase. But those figures are still close to 30%l below statistics from just three years ago.

“We can always pray we've seen the worst, but you never know," said home builder Don Klausmeyer after Friday's meeting. "All the indications are that we've pretty well bottomed out."

But for home builders like Klausmeyer, it's not all good news. Longhofer predicts new construction permits will again be slightly down this year.

“In order to see a good rebound in the construction market, we've got to see sales figures show a solid continuing increase in existing home sales,” Longhofer said.

Thanks to the new home buyer tax credit, experts predict a spike in home sales this spring. After June, those tax credits will expire. That's when Longhofer predicts home sales will drop.

Longhofer says despite the see-saw effect caused by the tax credits, the underlying markets continue to improve as a whole.

Longhofer says overall home appreciation should be modest in 2010 – around two percent for most homeowners.