Utah's housing market: Good time for buyers, but for how long?

Editor's note: Spring has sprung, and with it arrives plenty of questions about the state of Utah's housing market. A Deseret News special details where housing prices have come from, and more importantly where they might be headed. First of a two-part series.

MURRAY — After walking a pair of reporters through the World War II-era brick cottage, Bill Heiner is questioned about whether the home's $209,900 price point might still be too high given the renovations and upgrades the property requires.

The affable 30-year real estate veteran says he doesn't think so and that the current price tag, down almost 10 percent from the initial listing, is close to the sweet spot for this fixer-upper that literally stands a stone's toss away from Fashion Place mall. Confirmation, he said, could come soon in an offer he's awaiting on the home, which is part of an estate being liquidated by family members.

In the decade before this Murray home was constructed, Winston Churchill described pre-World War II Russia as a "riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." If only the Utah housing market circa 2010 were so easy to characterize.

Wary buyers and weary sellers appear the fidgety youngster, who after riding too long in the family car on vacation impetuously asks, "Are we there yet?" Might the tortuous ride down from the bubble years of 2006-07 finally be over?

As Utah enters another spring selling season, no one can say for certain. A divining rod may prove just as effective in correctly predicting when the Utah housing market reaches its bottom as stacks of historical data being analyzed with complex algorithms.

"For Sale" signs are popping up like crocuses and daffodils dotting front-yard landscapes. Some of these newly planted signs are carrying addendums in the lexicon of the day: "Short sale" or "Bank owned" adding to an already complicated matrix of supply and demand and price and equity.

Churchill did go on to say the key for Russia was its national interest, but if there's a key to discerning the future of local residential real estate prices, somebody went and lost it. Prices are marching lock step downward; sales are climbing. News of the economy grows upbeat. Federal and state governments seek to keep the market levitated with attractive tax incentives and appealing interest rates. Buyers are circling; sellers don't know what to think or do, except to maybe pop another Valium.

PRICE DOES MATTER

Location is supposed to be everything in real estate, but price is what's generating sales these days.