A few weeks (months?) ago we began hearing news about a light at the end of the tunnel, a recovery, and it’s becoming 
louder and louder. Currently MSNBC.com, CNN.com, BBC.com and even front page of BusinessWeek a few weeks back put a spot light on the housing market in some of the hardest hit areas in the country citing “signs of life” as the housing market begins picking up pace again along with economic indicators pointing towards a bottom and a road to recovery.
The big question, when will we hit bottom or have we already? As Realtors we and others in the industry that we work with daily are frequently hearing buyers saying they are waiting for the bottom to buy; hence the point of this blog entry. Keep in mind statistics
and trends are found and compiled after events, not before them thus if you are waiting for confirmation on hitting bottom you’re pretty much guaranteed to miss it. Additionally think about this, in Portland we’re seeing -2% to -7% depreciation rates, so lets say on a $300,000 home if you’re “waiting for the bottom” then you’re betting that home would be $285,000 in one year at -5% *if* (and that’s a huge if) we continue to see a solid decline for the next year, so you’d save $15,000 right?
Despite the outbreak of swine flu and the low level Air Force One fly over of NY city causing panic and evacuations yesterday and even in spite 
of the economy in general, guess what? Consumer confidence is up and not just up, but WAY UP. Economists expected an uptick, from 26.9 points in the NY Based Conference Board to 29.5, but it instead jumped to a whopping 39.2; yet another sign we may have hit bottom and are beginning to make the trek back up. I’ve been hearing more and more “we’ve hit bottom” from some economists and even a one liner in an article about 2 weeks back in the Oregonian home section, but this article with MSNBC.com mentions the same thing “another sign the housing crisis could be bottoming”, article available here. They mention in that same paragraph that home prices dropped sharply again in February but for the first time in 25 months it was not a record breaking drop.