Apr 14, 2008 7:07 pm US/Eastern
New Poll Finds Many Putting Off Buying A Home
WASHINGTON D.C. (CBS4) ―
A sagging U.S. economy and a slumping housing market has many people deciding to put off buying a home until things turn around.
In a recent Associated Press-AOL Money & Finance poll, sixty percent said they definitely won't buy a home in the next two years; that's up from 53 percent who had a similar response in an AP-AOL poll taken in September 2006. Only 11-percent replied that they are likely to buy soon; that's down from 15 percent two years ago.
For those considering a purchase, a quarter of respondents said they think home prices will continue to fall but 40-percent said they expect prices to continue to rise. Expectations for rising prices are highest in the South, while Westerners were likeliest to predict prices would continue to fall.
The negative responses to the housing market and the economy were not just from those considering a home purchase.
More than a quarter of homeowners said they were worried that their property value would go down over the next two years and one in seven said they feared not being able to make their mortgage payments over the next six months.
The AP-AOL Money & Finance poll was conducted from March 24-April 3 by Abt SRBI Inc. It involved telephone interviews with 1,002 adults nationwide, for whom the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
Click Here to see the full poll results.
(© 2008 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
