The bottoming out of U.S. real-estate

Here’s an interesting question; when is the American real estate market going to hit its lowest point and when will it be time to buy at bargain prices? This means that point in time should come when the sky is about to fall and when all of us are so desperate that we’re ready to move out to Canada, to New Zealand or some place in between providing there’s a vacant island on that spot. My personal guess is that our current real estate crisis isn’t going to get resolved before sometime in the next three to four years. Certain financial analysts claim that, as of today, there are 3.5 million excess homes that will have to sell. This further means that the close-to-one million homes we're now building each year will have to go down to 400,000. The bottom line is that it's going to take some time to work through this surplus for the prices to drop enough so that more people can either buy them or rent them. That’s why we’re probably talking about 2011 before we finally work through this glut and get back to a normal market where housing contributes significantly to our country’s GDP growth. So when is the right time to buy? It certainly depends on our regional various markets, the strength of the dollar, the rate of inflation and the state of our economy, but it seems that the right moment may fall between 2009 and 2010 at the earliest; and once more, savvy investors might want to be both extremely careful and very patient…