Need a weekend pick-me-up?

If you want to start your weekend off with a relatively upbeat view of the housing recovery I would encourage you to listen to Tuesday’s Planet Money podcast in which Moody’s economist Mark Zandi predicts that the housing market will stabilize in approximately 12 months.  Here is a brief summary from the Planet Money website:

If you want to know when the bust will end, Zandi says, look at foreclosures and short sales. Those typically occur at a big discount to prevailing prices, so they push overall prices down.

At the moment, almost a third of all houses being sold are foreclosures and short sales. The housing bust won’t really be over until that percentage falls sharply. Zandi says that’s likely to happen by the end of next year.

I’m going to put an event in my calendar to check back one year from now and see how Zandi’s prediction is playing out.