The time to buy a house if you are lucky enough to have available credit may be right now. I keep cringing when I see how steeply home prices are falling and even more so when I see foreclosures going for a pittance of their current value, much less what they will in a few years. If you have the means I would suggest you start looking at current mortgage rates and your local listings. Do you want to know how low some of these properties are going for? Let me give you a few examples I have seen recently. I looked at renting a house fourteen months ago and said forget it, because as nice as it was it was priced to cover their ballooning mortgage. They wanted $1100.00 a month and that got me a pool and hot tub which I had to cover an additional $100 monthly maintenance fee on. That wasn’t a huge deal, but the houses on either side which were just as big were renting for $800 and $900 a month. The house I would say valued at nearly $175k when I looked at it. It sold two weeks ago for $90k. I could have made the payment on a $90k home over thirty years even with a steep fixed interest rate. Another home I looked at buying nearly five years had five bedrooms, pool, hot tub, and two outbuildings with utilities sat on two acres in town and had a price tag of $300k. It was foreclosed on and sold at a sheriffs sale a month ago for just over $60k. The deals are out there and I wish I was in a better position, because even with higher interest rates the current homes on the market are way under valued. Be it for yourself or as an investment, now looks like a good time to buy if you can.
It definitely still is the time to buy. There are still a ton of houses out there that you can get for a great value. It is even better if you are a first time homebuyer and can get that tax rebate.