any guesses on when housing market will turn around?

[New2VA]

BTW...if you're looking at comps for your neighborhood, remember that it's not APPRAISED values, or list prices that you should be comparing to. It's the homes that have ACTUALLY SOLD over the past 3-6 months that demonstrate the price the market will bear. You're not going to be able to convince today's buyers that they should be paying what your home was worth "last spring" or when it was appraised for the remodeling you decided to do. That is not where people base their offers to buy a property. They look for what's happening NOW and very recently. And, when they discover that little to nothing has actually sold (should that be the case in your area), they have even more buying power to be the ones who will dictate what price to pay.

If you can believe this in today's market, we've actually had seller's come back to our reasonable offers to buy their home and say that they won't consider anything less than full price. Sure, there's the ocassional relo package that includes a nice buy-out clause or someone who might be in jeapordy of foreclosure and would rather go bankrupt, but aside from that if you're on the market now and have intentions of only accepting full price for your house, you'd probably better check your comps very carefully and set a realistic price. If there are 100 homes in your neighborhood, the comps are right there, not across the street in the milion plus "Mc"mansions they built last year. You might convince appraisers to look further than down your own block, but don't expect buyers to consider that in their calculations. Buyers aren't paying full price these days unless the home is being marketed far below appraised or fair market value.

[Tish Thompson]

According to Countrywide...biggest mortgage lender in the country...the housing market will probably continue to decline until 2009. A lot of people who should never have qualified for mortgages have loans that they can't afford and most of them will probably end up in foreclosure. In my market, there are currently more foreclosed/pre-foreclosure properties than not.

[MW2]

Hi New2VA
I found your post interesting thanks for offering up quite a few things to think about. I was just wondering though if you feel what you are saying applys to the Northern VA area as well? I would think things up there would move quicker than Ashland and Williamsburg just because of so many people moving to the area for jobs. I wonder if it will "get better" quicker in Nothern VA than other places especially with the jobs that are coming to Belvior and Quantico. Thanks for you input and opinions. Best of luck with the house hunting, it sounds like your ducks are all in a row and with time on your side you will definitely come out way ahead of the real estate game. :-)