Home prices might not reach rock bottom until 2013

According to the Orange Country Register, real estate experts at the National Association of Real Estate Writers' annual conference anticipate a slow housing recovery that could see home prices continue to drop into 2013.

Stan Humphries, chief economist for Zillow.com, said the home buyer tax credits that were meant to fuel the housing market might be hurting it, the news source reports. The tax credits may have temporarily helped home sales, but they cost $15 billion to $20 billion, and prices have dropped since the credits expired in September 2010. Humphries predicts that rental rates, however, will increase 1 percent by the end of the year.

According to the Houston Association of Realtors, single-family home rentals in the area rose 19.9 percent this past May, while single-family home sales fell 11.9 percent from May 2010.

In an interview with the Houston Chronicle, economist with the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University, Jim Gaines, said the lack of confidence is one of the biggest issues affecting the housing market. Gaines explained that the federal incentives of 2010 have skewed sales data, making it difficult to judge the market's recovery based on data from the summer of 2010.

Mark Dotzour, another chief economist for the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M, told the Register, "We're not in a double-dip in my mind. We just never hit bottom in the first place." 

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