Looney Tunes Propaganda: It May Be Time to Believe in Housing Again

02-16-2011 • CNBC.com

It's not as hard, however, to believe in housing. By that I mean that as the economy improves, and consumers start to feel better about their personal finances, they are starting to think about investing in their homes again. Too much price uncertainty in the market turns them off trading up, so they are looking around their current home instead. Yesterday I met with an architect in suburban DC who says that in just the past two months the phone has been ringing off the hook. "It's ringing with people saying, you know I want the $200,000 addition, which is the family room/kitchen or I can afford my screen porch now," says Michael Bruckwick of Katinas Bruckwick Architecture. Just last year, clients told Bruckwick a very different story. "Their biggest concerns was simply where is the world going ? The world that we live in. Is it to continue going down?" And it's not just in the DC area, which has the benefit of lower unemployment thanks to government jobs. A remodeling index from Texas-based BuildFax shows a national surge in remodeling work toward the end of the year, which appears to be continuing now. It's returning...