Homeowners Remain Wary About Short-Term Housing Recovery, Confident About Long-Term Market Values

Homeowners continue to hold little hope for the value of their house in the short-term and show no new confidence in long-term recovery.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that only 21% of Adults who own a house say the value of their home will go up in the next year.  Twenty-five percent (25%) expect their home value to go down, while a majority (52%) says it will remain about the same.  (To see survey  question wording, click here.)

Since early December 2008, short-term optimism in the housing market has ranged from a low of 15% to a high of 31%, reached in April of last year.

When asked about five years, however, 51% of homeowners say the value of their house will go up in that time.  Fifteen percent (15%) say it will go down, and another 26% feel their home value will stay about the same in five years. 

A majority of homeowners have been optimistic about long-term improvement for a couple years now.  But in December 2008, 59% of homeowners said the price of their house was likely to go up, the highest level ever measured on this question.

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The survey of 730 Homeowners was conducted on February 5-6, 2011 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 4 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.