Now's the Time to Buy a New Home

Today's new stats on housing prices yield one shakable fact amid tons of useless information: If you’re in the market for a house, this could be your moment. “Homes are now cheap,” writes Brett Arends. The combination of a 30% drop in home prices since 2005 and falling mortgage rates means “buying a home now is as cheap as it was in the mid-1990s, when houses were an absolute steal.”

“Doomsayers” worry about the effects of unemployment and foreclosures—“but the whole point about markets is that they adjust,” Arends writes in the Wall Street Journal. “They reflect this bad news, and more. If you have a stable income, and you can get a 30-year mortgage at 5% or so, and you are willing to drive a hard bargain on a home in this market, this is your time.”
(More home prices stories.)