North Shore Views

The Home Buyer Tax Credit Expires Today – Now What?

CNBC’s Diana Olick talked to Mark Zandi of Moodys Economy.com and Thomas Lawler of Lawler Economics/Housing Consulting about how today’s expiration of the tax credit will impact the housing market.

Watch the video below for the full story, but here’s the bottom line:

The tax credit pulled forward sales that would have happened anyway, and got them to happen faster. That means we will see a slowdown in buying activity for the next 2-3 months.

We will likely see some more modest price declines this year due to the high number of distressed properties and the end of credit-easing measures by the Fed. As a result, the housing market won’t really get going again until 2011.

Two things will accelerate a return to “normalcy” in the housing market:

• A pick-up in job growth.
• Continued low rate of housing starts, so that we can work through the over-supply of homes on the market.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 30th, 2010 at 8:49 pm and is filed under Real estate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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