I totally concur with surveyor’s recommendations. Those are very solid ideas.
Also, when trying to guess the future of the market, keep this in mind:
The same force that drove it into the stratosphere will drive it into the basement: market psychology.
The only reason prices are as high as they are is that people thought that prices would keep going up and that buying a house, the biggest house you could make the payments on (even if you could only afford the payments temporarily), was the easiest way to make lots of money. It didn’t matter what you paid for it, just buy it at any price; it would be more next year. Now, the psychology has started to shift. It’s shifting even faster than a lot of gloom-and-doomers thought it would shift. Human beings in general follow the herd. This negativity on the part of buyers will increase as more people get caught up in the herd, and before long the negative feelings will be as dominant as the positive feelings were on the way up. Then most people won’t want to buy a house at all, for fear of paying more for it than it will be worth next year. Demand plummets, and with it, prices.
