Now that we are halfway through 2011, it’s time to reassess where the real estate market is headed. Or more specifically, where real estate markets are headed - plural. After all, it’s difficult to determine how things are going on a macro scale when progress is first made in the small communities that make up our bustling towns, cities, counties and states.

So that’s where we will look first. What’s going on at the lowest level? Well, fortunately for many communities, there are a lot of areas that are beginning to recover from the housing boom and subsequent bust of the last few years. Although progress is slow, it’s also steady, and there are communities across the country, most notably in rural and less populated areas, that are beginning to see their median home values rise.

At the same time, large cities are also beginning to see progress, but because there is much more diversity in these metropolitan areas, it’s difficult to pinpoint success when some neighborhoods are doing well and others are still suffering. On the whole, however, it can be said that many cities are beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

We can expect that progress on a large economical level probably won’t be seen for another few years. New home sales are still very low and it will be some time before they will match pre-2006 levels. This isn’t entirely bad, however, because ideally, we would like to avoid the sales rates that occurred at this time because many of the sales shouldn’t have happened in the first place. So we can see that home sales might not be the best indicator of economic success in the real estate market.

We will keep our eyes on the future and see how the rest of 2011 turns out. We expect good things, but we also need to be patient and not expect results over night.