The rate at which home prices are dropping may be slowly coming to a halt across the United States, with analysts at Barclays Capital predicting only a 4 or 5% dip left to go before stabilization. But the rate of appreciation on the back side of that bottoming out is likely to “muddle along for the next few years,” they say in a weekly letter to investors.

This conclusion is based on expected aftershocks of the “smoothed-out” housing supply model, where millions of potential foreclosures are being averted temporarily with government-backed programs or by suppliers slowing the rate in which foreclosures hit the market. On the positive side, they say this effort actually prevented home prices from falling considerably more.

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