Home values in the US will continue their decline until the middle of 2011 before starting on the road to recovery in the final six months of the year, a new poll conducted by Reuters has suggested.
Canvassing the opinion of 26 of the leading US-based economists, over half said that they believe that the market would hit bottom this year in either the second or third-quarter.
"A pullback in prices following the expiration of the homebuyers tax credit was not a surprise. Ultimately, a recovery in the housing sector will depend critically on the job market, which should improve over time," Scott Brown at Raymond James told the news provider.
In terms of property values, the Reuters poll found that when asked how much further prices would fall before stabilising, the average response was by another 3.3 per cent on current levels. However, two economists predicted further declines as high as ten per cent.
House prices in the US are at a reasonable level, it was suggested. When the experts were asked to rate current prices on a scale of one to ten - where ten represents overvalued and one means undervalued – the majority of those questioned gave the answer four, five or six.