Will the prices of houses ever go down?

A real estate agent told me never, but I heard from someone else they have to. Will they? (I hope so)

If they do, I can't imagine it being too great!

There is just too high a demand on LI

I know its depressing! Fi and I are looking now and its nuts to spend this much!

My concern isnt that we can afford it now because now we know what we can afford (the prices are nuts but really besides moving out of state what can you do) but its 5 years from now when we start a family and I am not working (we both want me to be a stay at home mommy) that freaks me out!!

In this market can you really be a single income family EVER???

I hate to be pessimistic on this, but don't count on it unless there's a big recession with very high unemployment. Then you may see a lot of people being forced to sell because they can't make mortgage payments, or fleeing to other states hoping to find work. Enough of that would flood the market and drive prices down, but then you'd have to hope you're in a postition to buy too.

Here's a link to an article someone posted elsewhere on this site. future home prices

It lists likely home price increases in over 300 metropolitan locations. Nassau, using $315,240 as an average price for 2003, predicts a 10.4% increase in one year, 40.2% increase in 3 years, and 74.7% increase in 5 years! Suffolk isn't listed, I don't forsee as steep an increase rate there since it's a further commute from NYC and more room to build, but I think it will follow the trend line.

I actually no longer believe so. DH and I have been watching the market for about 3 yrs now (we weren't in the biggest rush to buy) and it's incredible how much the market has increased....so much so that we figured it would eventually level off or dip back down.

Location is key, so any house within a commutabe distance from NYC I think will steadily increase over time. Like Karen said, I don't expect any changes unless something really drastic occurs.

It's very frustrating knowing we could have bought a nice house in the area we want for $320K 3 yrs ago and that same house would now be sold for about $440K or so, but we were just not ready to buy at that time. Nor did we even decide where we wanted to buy.....

Everything happens for a reason!