Slow and steady, wins the race.

Let's face it folks, in the last few years there has been much speculation on market projections in housing. There always is, but since the mid 2000's market collapse, the subsequent bursting of "ye olde" bubble and housing market reconstruction, economists and analysts have widely debated the immediate and long term future of the market. Many changes in lending practices have been made at the Federal level to protect against mortgage fraud and indirectly, the formation of housing bubbles among other things. Though it's also debatable, most would consider the better part of 2011 to be the bottom of the market. Since 2012, most markets appear to have seen fairly steady levels of growth with occasional dips and spikes as expected. For all those pattern recognize-rs and bubble formation projectionists who were worried about annual growth levels higher than 10% in most of 2013 and early this year, the analysts in this article from the Florida Association of Realtors say you can relax for the time being.

 Now that we're well into the fourth quarter, all data shows that most markets are experiencing slowing but healthy growth percentages across the country. While real estate professionals, investors and current home owner's alike would prefer to see more rapid growth as was felt in the last 18 or so months, this slow and steady pace is much better for the housing market in the long term. This is also good news for buyers because the data shows that the the more stable property value growth will help attribute to a possible paradigm shift into more of a buyer's market. The logic is that buyer's will have more of a competitive edge because while sellers are much more comfortable listing their homes in the current market, the increase in inventory expected should make sellers more flexible in negotiations. These stable growth levels and the still historically low interest rates should keep housing rather affordable yet still enticing to sellers to list their homes.