Wait until real estate clouds clear?

Is 2024 the year to get back into a homebuying mood?

Or after a historically slow year for home sales, should house hunters wait for the real estate clouds to clear?

Well, everyone’s situation is different, from stages of life to family needs to personal finances and job security. Plus the emotional weight of house hunting — from juggling various opinions to risk tolerance to a desire for a perceived bargain — also is part of the equation.

But amid various personal, real estate and economic uncertainties, one might wonder if waiting until 2025 to buy is worthwhile. Could homebuying be any more unaffordable? Will prices swing up or down this year? Will mortgage rates soar — or tumble back to the 5% range?

Economic history serves as a useful tool to test if a wait-and-see approach might pay off for a California homeowner wannabe. Yes, it can diminish the value of current marketplace trends. But despite the all-too-frequently claimed “it’s different this time” logic, history has a curious habit of repeating itself.

So as a public service, the trusty spreadsheet looked at a history of one-year moves in prices and rates to gauge how often waiting 12 months to buy paid off.

Will homes get cheaper?

Think about California home value swings through a combination of three Case-shiller price indexes for Los Angeles-orange County, San Francisco and San Diego.

This history dates to 1987, including the housing booms of the late 1980s and the early 2000s, real estate’s ugliness of the early 1990s and the Great Recession,

CHART BY FLOURISH This chart tracks California house payments since 1988.