My story today about improvements in the February housing market in the Twin Cities has a lot of folks wondering if the market has finally hit bottom.
That's a resounding "yes," according to one of the go-to-sites for real estate junkies and personal finance geeks. In a recent post, Calculated Risk makes a thoughtful argument about why the bottom is here.
What's more interesting than the prediction itself, is an discussion of why there are actually two bottoms. "The first is for new home sales, housing starts and residential investment. The second bottom is for prices. Sometimes these bottoms can happen years apart."
In case you don't visit the blog, I offer two important caveats from the post itself: The post focuses on national trends, smartly noting that there are tremendous various from community to community. And though we've reached a bottom, or at least a bottom is near, "usually towards the end of a housing bust, nominal prices mostly move sideways for a few years, and real prices (adjusted for inflation) could even decline for another 2 or 3 years."
