Let’s face it, the housing market hasn’t made too much of a boom lately. This is a common scene in most neighborhood, signs littering yards saying buy me.

Many buyers have cold feet, not wanting to buy waiting for prices to go lower. Sellers are doing anything they can do to sell their home in the flooded market, up to offering much less than their homes value to attract buyers.

“Many strategies have been tried over the last five years, but still we’re dealing with declining home prices and complicated mortgage processes,”said CEO of National Value Assurance Company, Tim Flynn.

Home Buyers Price Protection is a new paradigm. It asks sellers to put some of their money into the game insuring buyers that if the relative value of their home declines over a certain period of time they will be reimbursed up to a certain amount.

Full story is available on KDLT News

The days when anyone could claim to have a reliable crystal ball for the real estate market have long passed. Nevertheless, what’s past is prologue: There’s a lot going on in the market right now that is likely to have a pretty predictable impact on real estate in 2011. Let’s look at how homebuyers can expect to fare next year with these four real estate predictions:

1. Prices and mortgage rates will stay low in most areas, but will rise in affluent areas and markets experiencing job/population growth.

If you’ve been watching the housing market bottom out over the past few years, cursing the fact that as soon as prices dropped, down payment requirements ticked upward, stop cursing and start saving. Any fears that you’ll quickly be priced out of the market are relatively unfounded, in most areas. High numbers of homes for sale, the continued influx of distressed properties like short sales and foreclosures into the housing market, the overall economy’s stagnation and high unemployment, and the probable lack of new government incentives for home buying will all combine to keep the supply/demand imbalance tilted pretty heavily in favor of buyers. That, in turn, will keep prices relatively low, especially compared to their 2006 peak. And when buyer activity is low, the Fed keeps interest rates low, too.

Full story is available on WalletPop

Home appraisals, which were blamed for being too generous during the housing boom, are now being criticized by some homeowners for being too stingy, preventing them from refinancing or borrowing against their houses.

The criticism is being leveled at computerized real-estate appraisals, which depend on models that use prices from home sales and other data to determine the value of a house. Because of the volatility in the housing market, they are underestimating prices, some homeowners, real-estate agents and fee appraisers say.

Full story is available on The Wall Street Journal

If you’re in the market to buy a foreclosured house despite all the hassles and long waits associated with buying one, here’s a way to find properties in your area that are either in pre-foreclosure or are already owned by a bank.

Ben Popken over at the Consumerist.com blog recently shared a tip from the Dregs of the Future blog about how to find foreclosures using Google Maps.

Here are the basic steps.

1. Enter an address at Google maps.
2. Click on the “More” tab in the top right corner of the map.
3. Select “Real Estate” in the drop-down menu.
4. On the left side of the page, uncheck “For sale” and check “Foreclosure.”

Full story is available on The New York Times

When Bloomberg polled so-called real estate “experts” about the housing market, they expected a slight pull-back in housing prices of perhaps 0.2 percent when compared to a year ago. Instead, the Case-Shiller Index showed prices dropped four times greater than expected: “The biggest year-over-year decline since December 2009,” according to the group.

This caused many of those observers to confirm the worse than expected result. Dean Maki at Barclays Capital said, “The housing market does remain weak and none of the recent data suggest a substantial pickup.” David Blitzer, chairman of the index committee, expressed dismay at the numbers: “The double-dip is almost here…[sales aren’t] giving any sense of optimism.”

The decline didn’t surprise Richard Suttmeier, at Minyanville, who wrote that “home prices will resume [their] decline that began in mid-2006…we face continued foreclosure issues including questionable documentation, and banks have a record high Other Real Estate Owned (OREO) [which is] up 338.2% since the end of 2007. Depressed home sales [mean homes] are being sold at a 30% to 35% discount…”

Full story is available on The New American

Government support for the housing market should be cautiously withdrawn and not be rushed, Scott Garrett, the incoming chairman of the U.S. House Financial Services subcommittee, told the Wall Street Journal.

“We recognize that some things can be done overnight and other things cannot be,” Garrett, a Republican representative for New Jersey’s 5th Congressional district told the Journal.

Garrett, who would oversee housing finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac upon assuming charge, told the Journal that he has “not established a specific time frame for winding them down.”

“You have to recognize what the impact would be on the fragile housing market as it stands right now,” Garrett told the Journal.

Full story is available on Reuters

Home prices have begun to fall again. The most recent report showing the housing market’s decline came on Tuesday when the October data for the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index was released. It indicated that in many areas, home prices have been falling since July. That’s after prices appeared to be slowly rising for the year or so prior. This has caused some to declare that the housing market is experiencing a double dip. That isn’t quite right.

Here’s Alan Beattie and Robin Harding from the Financial Times expressing this concern:

The Case-Shiller measure showed house prices in six markets – Atlanta, Charlotte, Miami, Portland, Seattle and Tampa – hitting their lowest level since they began to fall in 2006 and 2007. “The double-dip is almost here, as six cities set new lows for the period since the 2006 peaks,” said David M. Blitzer, Chairman of the Index Committee at Standard & Poor’s, which produces the index. “There is no good news in October’s report. Home prices across the country continue to fall.”

Full story is available on The Atlantic

The October Case Shiller home price data released yesterday seem to have revived the calls for a housing double-dip. Prices were a bit lower than expected, and according to the broader measure of prices (a composite of 20 large markets), they are now at a new post-recession low in real terms (but only by a hair). But whether the recent modest decline in prices is the beginning of a new major downturn in prices remains to be seen; it could be just temporary, and in any event it represents price action from the third quarter of last year, which was a period we now know was somewhat of an economic soft patch.

The bigger picture is that both indices show housing prices have fallen about 35% from their 2006 highs in major markets, which also happened to be the areas with the most froth at the peak. Coupled with an almost 25% decline in mortgage rates since 2006, the effective cost of buying a house dropped by some 50% in just four years. The real question today is whether that price drop is sufficient to elicit enough buyers to purchase the large (but presumably still shadow) inventory of foreclosed homes that are likely to be hitting the market over the next year. Even as housing prices have declined significantly, new household formations have continued and the population has grown.

Full story is available on Seeking Alpha

It’s a question many Americans want answered: Will the value of my home rise or fall next year? Smart minds fall in both camps — here are both sides of the coin on real estate.

One of the most closely watched sectors in 2011 will continue to be real estate – a wildly emotional and divisive topic that’s puzzled investors and economists since the housing bubble burst around 2007. Earlier this year, many observers thought the market would turn around in a big way as federal tax credits spurred home purchases and the economy added jobs following hundreds of billions of dollars of government stimulus spending.

As the end of the year approaches, the prospects of a real recovery look much dimmer. For one, it’s become clear that we won’t see a true rebound until we have job growth. With unemployment showing few signs of improvement so far, the bullish take on housing seems hard to swallow, especially when many experts say home prices still have room to fall before hitting bottom.

Full story is available on CNNMoney

Perhaps the biggest question facing the housing market in 2011: Is this the year housing actually hits bottom?

Home prices are expected to fall another 5% in 2011, though there are some who say price declines could be much worse. Here’s our list of four issues to keep an eye on in 2011 (or take a look-back at last year’s list):

1. Jobs: Call it a cop out because it’s so obvious, but without more tax credits to juice sales, the housing market needs job growth.

First, who’s going to buy a house when they’re not certain they’ll have a job in six months and when it looks like home prices are likely to fall another 5%? Mortgage rates spent much of 2010 at a level that hadn’t been seen since the Eisenhower administration, but it didn’t do to increase buyer demand.

A crummy job market means that more homeowners risk falling behind on their payments, which would add to the supply of lower-priced foreclosed homes–further depressing prices. Foreclosures are already expected to pick up in 2011, though the rising supply could be offset somewhat by very low levels of new home construction.

Full story is available on The Wall Street Journal