Closings

Can Housing Markets Stabilize in 2010? 

By now, uncertainty, hope and anxiety for housing should be at a peak. Government support is waning: The homebuyer tax credits expire at the end of this month (to sign binding contracts, the sales must be closed by June), and the Fed should have bought the last of its $1.25 trillion mortgage-backed securities last month. And by now the normal seasonal upturn in housing activity should have begun. Most analysts took last summer’s modest lift in home prices as a signal that the free fall in housing markets was over, but prices and sales slumped again in an especially hard winter.