Great Epectations

Real Estate analyst Steve Harney is reflecting on the latest Home Price Expectation Survey that came out a few weeks ago.  It’s a quarterly report done where they survey a nationwide panel of over 100 economists, real estate experts and investment and market strategists. They take over a hundred of the real gurus in our industry and they say, “Where do you think prices are going to be over the next five years?”
The survey takes both ends of the spectrum and everyone in between and they mesh all their answers together, and then they give you the average.  It surveys the experts, both bulls and bears, and says, “All right, what’s the average of their findings?”  They give us a little historical perspective on it. Here is the average annual appreciation on a yearly basis.

What these experts did is looked at it and said, all right, what’s the pre-bubble number? What happened during the bubble? And they redefined the bubble. That’s why that number sometimes vacillates a little bit.

 What happened during the bust? What’s happened so far from the bottom to where we are today? And what are the expectations on an annual basis going forward?