No recovery in home prices until 2020?
That's what the nation's bankers are predicting in a survey just released by FICO.
Nearly half - or 49 percent - of risk management officers surveyed at banks across the country don't see home prices climbing back to 2007 levels for nearly another decade.
By comparison, just 21 percent thought prices would rebound before the decade ends.
An even larger number - 73 percent - are banking on foreclosures being a major problem for at least another five years. About half, 46 percent expect mortgage delinquencies, the first step towards an eventual foreclosure, to rise over the next six months.
OK, I haven't exactly been breathlessly following FICO's surveys, so I guess I missed this, but the bankers are apparently feeling markedly sour as of late after a burst of relative optimism early this year.
So what does this mean for Massachusetts, and in particular, for the Greater Boston market?
The real estate downturn has been spotty in the Boston area, with some towns hit hard even has others, especially upscale suburbs, not seeing all that much of a decline in prices from the bubble years
Yet treading water is a far different than a return of boom times, and even if prices have been stubborn on the way down, sales have been in the dumps for years now.
So are we looking at a lost decade, even here in the Boston area?
Maybe, and it's hardly without precedent. Home prices stabilized after a steep dive in the late 1980s, but it took another decade, the 1990s, before prices were ready to start moving up again.
Beyond 495, we could be looking at even tougher decade ahead, with continued declines in home prices that mirror the grimmer real estate reality the rest of the country has been grappling with.
