Real estate industry in the US predicting a slow but steady recovery in the nation’s property market

 
NAR chief economist Lawrence Yun to the 2010 Realtors Conference and  Expo that he expects a continuing improvement of underlying fundamentals of the current market in the coming years.
 
‘A slow recovery is taking place as we head toward our goal of a stable, solid housing market. However, the pace of job growth will determine the strength of the housing market recovery,’ he explained.
 
Thomas Hoenig, president of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank, told the conference that re-establishing sensible, solid underwriting standards and down payment requirements would help stabilize the market. ‘I am confident that the nation’s housing market will get stronger. What we need is a more stable market in the future with healthy cycles and not booms and busts,’ said Koenig.
 
Overall real estate experts are cautiously optimistic about the current and future state of the industry. Panelist Margaret Kelly, chief executive officer of RE/MAX, said today’s market shouldn’t be called the new normal because the old market was abnormal. ‘The spike up and down in the housing market wasn’t normal so we shouldn’t be measuring ourselves against it,’ she said.
 
Kelly added that despite some challenges there are plenty of opportunities in the housing market with low mortgage interest rates, abundant inventory and stable prices attracting buyers to the market.
 
‘To be successful in the current housing market, real estate professionals need to educate themselves about buying and selling distressed properties and working with investor buyers, who are a significant part of the market. Real estate professionals should be learning how to handle short sales, how to market themselves and find buyers and to really understand market conditions,’ she explained.
 
According to Ron Peltier, chairman and chief executive officer of HomeServices of America said that today’s real estate market closely resembles the market in 2000, which many people thought was a good year in real estate. ‘Today buyers need to have jobs and be creditworthy. The underlying principles of home ownership are now the same as they were 100 years ago. We want a sense of home and community, we strive for long term not short term home ownership and we have sense of pride for owning a home,’ he told the conference.
 
To achieve a full recovery, Peltier said that the market must work through the foreclosure issue, which is dragging down home sales and prices, consumer confidence and the health of the housing market and economy.
 
Alex Perriello, president and chief executive officer of Realogy Franchise Group, told delegates that there are no signs that the property market will recover in the short term and that many agents and offices have had a difficult time adjusting to the new conditions by ‘right sizing’ their offices with fewer staff and lower budgets.
 
Matt Vernon, senior vice president for retail sales at Bank of America Home Loans, admitted that in the beginning, Bank of America and other lenders didn’t respond quickly enough to handle the large scale of short sale transactions, but hiring more staff, increasing education and developing an extreme customer focus have helped to shorten and improve the process.