The housing boom of recent years is clearly over and the down market that currently prevails today has raised some serious challenges for home builders, who are most concerned about selling off the homes they have in inventory. But conditions are hardly a bust for prospective home buyers, who will find opportunities today that didn’t exist a couple of years ago when homes were soaring off the shelves and builders were selling them faster than they could be built. This scenario holds true for new homes in North Carolina as well as across the United States.

The speculators who flooded the market in search of overnight gains are gone, and with them the excessive exuberance that at the height of the boom had prospective home buyers scrambling for properties in a raucous seller’s market. When they found homes they liked, buyers in the hot markets had little choice but to pounce on them or lose them, often finding themselves engaged in a spirited bidding war that would push the price significantly above the seller’s original asking price.

Today, the tables have turned dramatically. It’s a buyer’s market, and families looking to buy can shop at their leisure and deliberate over what home comes closest to filling their needs and desires. There is an abundance of new housing to choose from, with energy-saving features, green products and other amenities that demonstrate the big strides the industry has taken in recent years in applying cutting-edge technology to residential construction. And builders are in a generous mood, offering a range of concessions – from upgrades to help with financing – aimed at making that sale so they can turn their attention to preparing for the return of more robust times when the market starts regaining its strength in a year or so.

The trade-off for today’s buyers of new homes in North Carolina is on the mortgage financing side, where conditions have tightened considerably from the easy lending standards available during the boom. Buyers hoping to obtain a mortgage without being able to document their income, for instance, are probably out of luck, and real down payments are now the rule rather than the exception. And that may not be such a bad thing, because too many households got caught up in the enthusiasm of the buying spree prevailing during the boom, and didn’t pay close enough attention to ensuring that they would have the ability to repay the large loans they were signing.

There are some serious problems in today’s mortgage market and the availability of financing is not what it should be, particularly in the sub-prime and jumbo loan markets. However, the majority of home buyers for new homes in North Carolina will be obtaining conventional, conforming mortgages, which have remained largely unaffected by the shakeout in lending to borrowers with blemished credit histories. Also, interest rates for these mortgages remain well within the affordable range. Available loans are limited to $417,000 and conform to other standards that enable the lender to sell them to the government-sponsored enterprises, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which then package the loans and sell them to investors.

Mortgages insured by the Federal Housing Administration, requiring as little as 3 percent down payments, may be well-suited to first-time home buyers or those who don’t quite measure up to the credit requirements that lenders are now setting for conventional conforming loans.

The most important thing for would-be buyers is to work with the builder to find the mortgage that will enable them to buy the house of their dreams at a cost that fits their budget. In today’s market, new homes are available in a range of prices, and good financing options remain, even in instances where there may be some challenges.

Today’s housing conditions separate the speculator out to make a fast buck from the earnest buyers who have traditionally been the mainstay of the market, looking for housing as a place to live and build equity and financial security as the family grows. Housing prices increased at a record clip during the boom, doubling in some places, and that was clearly unsustainable. The market is settling back now, with some decline in housing prices that are relatively small compared to recent price gains and that will help to restore a sorely needed measure of affordability. Buyers who are shopping the market now will find that this is working to their advantage, allowing them to obtain housing they might not have been able to put their hands on when the market was in overdrive.

Housing has always been a cyclical business, with its ups and downs. As surely as the market has slowed today, it will start picking up speed again. Projected increases in theU.S. population and household formations alone ensure growing demand for housing in the decade ahead. For families who desire to move to new homes in North Carolina, the best time to make that move may be now – before the competition returns. No matter what is being said about the current housing downturn, there are some surprising opportunities out there. Prospective buyers owe it to themselves to at least go out and look at what’s available, and they may very well discover some unexpected advantages to turn their home-buying ambitions into a reality.

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