It would be comforting if they were. Yet the unfortunate truth is that the tea leaves don’t clearly suggest any particular path for prices, either up or down.

On the one hand, there were sharp price increases in 2012, with the S.&P./Case-Shiller 20-City Index, which I helped devise, up a total of 9 percent over the six months from March to September. That comes after what was generally a decline in prices for five consecutive years. And while prices dropped very slightly in October, the trend was quite encouraging for the market. (Our November data come out on Tuesday.)

But some of these changes were seasonal. Home prices have tended to rise every midyear and to fall slightly every fall and winter. And for some unknown reason, seasonal effects have become more pronounced since the financial crisis.

After screening out these effects, a number of indicators are up, including data for housing starts and permits as well as the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Index of traffic of prospective homebuyers, which has made a spectacular rebound since last spring.

What might explain this picture? It’s hard to pin down, because nothing drastically different occurred in the economy from March to September. Yes, there was economic improvement: the unemployment rate, for example, dropped to 7.8 percent from 8.2 percent. But that extended a trend in place since 2009. There was also a decline in foreclosure activity, but for the most part that is also a continuing trend, as reported by RealtyTrac.

And, last spring, along with Karl Case of Wellesley College and Anne Thompson of McGraw-Hill Construction, I conducted a detailed survey of the attitudes of recent home buyers in four American cities, as I discussed here in October. We did not see any evidence of increased optimism.

In short, it is hard to find an exact cause for the rebound in home prices. But that isn’t unusual — we hardly ever know the real causes of major changes in speculative prices. Yet we do know that any short-run increase in inflation-adjusted home prices has been virtually worthless as an indicator of where home prices will be going over the next five or more years.

THERE is a good deal of short-run momentum in home prices — they tend to keep going in the same direction for a year or maybe more. But those prices have generally reverted to the mean fairly quickly, in inflation-corrected terms. The upswing in home prices from 1997 to 2006 — up 86 percent, in real terms — was an anomaly. And that upswing was almost completely reversed by 2012. We certainly can’t rule out another boom. It’s possible that the 20th-century pattern of real home prices, which typically hugged the historical mean, has disappeared. Perhaps people are more speculative in their thinking, after the recent roller-coaster ride, and more prepared psychologically to buy into a bubble. But I wouldn’t put any money on that.

History doesn’t suggest that another big bubble will come so fast. In fact, before the most recent one, the United States had had only one major national home price boom in the last century, when real prices rose a total of 68 percent from 1942 to 1953.

After the traumatic collapse of the last price bubble, Americans seem less sanguine about owning versus renting. According to the Census Bureau, the homeownership rate has been falling, from 69.0 percent in the third quarter of 2006 to 65.5 percent in the third quarter last year.

A study of the causes of these rate movements, by Stuart Gabriel of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Stuart Rosenthal of Syracuse University, concluded that further declines seem likely, but that a forecast would depend “on uncertain forecasts of attitudes toward investing in homeownership as well as changes in credit market and other economic conditions.” (The study was presented at the January meetings of the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association/American Economic Association.) If the trend continues, it would suggest long-term declines in prices of existing detached single-family homes, because they are costly to manage as rentals.

The housing market has also been subject to new oversight, including that of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which just this month announced new ability-to-repay standards for mortgage lenders. Those standards will make wild lending harder to do.

So it seems that since 2006, our society — including both buyers and lenders — hasn’t become more speculative in its attitudes toward housing. Instead, it has become more wary, and more regulated.

And, of course, economic clouds are still hovering. Slow overall growth continues in the United States, and European financial markets remain vulnerable.Much of our economy, notably housing, is still supported by taxpayer bailouts, which are clearly not a long-term solution. There are also lingering uncertainties about emerging-market economies, as well as the risk that a disturbance in the Middle East could cause an energy crisis.

Most experts are not predicting any big change in home prices. As of December, the Zillow-Pulsenomics Home Price Expectations Survey, which involves more than 100 forecasters, and the S.& P. Case/Shiller Composite Index Futures were both forecasting modest increases for the next half-decade, implying inflation-adjusted price growth of 1 to 2 percent a year.

The bottom line for potential home buyers or sellers is probably this: Don’t do anything dramatic or difficult. There is too much uncertainty to justify any aggressive speculative moves right now. If you have personal reasons for getting into or out of the housing market, go ahead. Otherwise, don’t stay up worrying about home prices any more than you do about stock prices.

I can’t offer any clearer picture, and I don’t see a solid basis for anyone else to do so, either.

Robert J. Shiller is professor of economics and finance at Yale.

 

Photo credit: Angela Gaul | A “sold” sign hangs outside a home located at 293 Congers Rd. in New City. (Dec. 28, 2012)

Westchester County’s white-hot rental market trails only New York City and San Francisco as the most expensive in the country, and the combination of low inventory and high prices may be pushing prospective renters to consider buying instead, according to analysts and recent statistics.

In the fourth quarter of 2012, the average rent for Westchester County properties across all property types, from studios to penthouses, climbed .4 percent to $1,852, according to preliminary data from real estate research company Reis Inc. The vacancy rate expanded 14.3 percent — from 3 percent to 3.5 percent — but remained 1 percentage point below the national average of 4.5 percent.

Ryan Severino, senior economist at Reis, said that renters who avoided buying property as the housing bubble collapsed may reconsider.

“You have a segment of the population who delayed buying houses because of deflationary expectations,” he said. “They’ve already had to stomach 8-10 percent rent increases. What we’re starting to see at the top of the food chain is people are going to say: ‘Why pay two, three thousand in rent? Maybe I should buy into the for-sale housing market again?'”

For those who remain in the Westchester County rental market in 2013, Severino forecast that rents will climb 2.5-3 percent and that the vacancy rate will expand a hair, by .1 to .2 percent. That compares with a 2.2 percent increase in rents in 2012 and a .6 percent increase in the vacancy rate.

Steve Bernasconi, a real estate agent at Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate/Rand Realty in Nanuet, said that the Rockland County rental market also is showing signs of a turn.

“More people are in a buying mode,” he said. “In today’s world [with rents of] $1,900 a month, if you’ve got any sort of credibility, you have to be buying.”

Of the 240 Rockland County rental properties on the Multiple Listing Service, the median price was $1,785 for a two-bedroom, one-bath unit with 948 square feet. Skewing the prices, however, are properties at the top end, like the nearly 7,000-square-foot single-family house overlooking the Hudson River at 28 River Rd. in Grand View-on-Hudson. Monthly rent? $18,000.

Though market forces are prompting some to consider buying, Lori Morrow, a broker with Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage in New Rochelle, said individual circumstances sometimes can take precedence.

“Most of the people who are renting at the high end — there’s a purpose for their renting,” she said. “They’re not going to be here very long or they want to test the area or they don’t have the down payment or the credit score.”

In some cases, renters are newly divorced and want to take a year to transition before they buy, she added.

Tougher mortgage requirements by banks and a sluggish employment market also have conspired to keep prospective buyers out of the market.

Rental prices in New York City averaged $2,985 in the fourth quarter of 2012, far outstripping No. 2 San Francisco at $1,970 and almost triple the national average of $1,048, according to Reis.

Vacancy rates in the New York City market were 2.1 percent, the tightest of the 82 metropolitan areas surveyed.

The average fourth quarter rent for northern New Jersey was $1,531, and Long Island’s was $1,609.

Morrow said scores of co-ops are sitting vacant in Westchester County, and the county’s apartment inventory would expand if the boards of cooperatives allowed more units to be rented.

“They can’t sell them and they can’t rent them,” she said. “We have co-ops all over the place just sitting there. Boards just don’t allow rentals.”

There is a 22-month backlog of co-op units for sale in New Rochelle, Morrow said, and that likely reflects market conditions in the rest of Westchester County. By contrast, at the end of September, there was an 11-month supply of condominiums, she said.