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If you’re a home seller who lives in the Midwest, you might want to hold off on selling your home in the next six months, at least if a new survey from online real estate site HomeGain is to be believed.

According to HomeGain’s 2010 second quarter home prices survey, home values in Illinois, Tennessee and Michigan should fall in the next half year.

Those three states made the company’s list of 10 states in which real estate agents think that home values will fall in the next six months.

In fact, Michigan ranked first, with 55 percent of surveyed agents saying that they thought the state’s housing values would fall. Illinois came in seventh place, with 39 percent of agents predicting a fall, while Tennessee, where 38 percent of agents predicted the same thing, came in ninth.

This is no list that any state wants to be on. Here’s what’s really interesting, though; there’s a big disconnect between what agents think and what their clients expect. Take Michigan. While 55 percent of agents predict a fall in housing prices in the next six months, only 29 percent of homeowners predict that their homes will fall in value during the same time.

It doesn’t take a math major to see that there’s a big difference here.

Louis Cammarosano, general manager of HomeGain, told me in a phone interview that he’s more likely to believe that the real estate agents are right in this case. Homeowners have an obvious vested interest in seeing their housing values increase, Cammarosano said. They’re less likely, then, to want to predict that they’ll fall instead. Real estate agents are more realistic, he said. They’ve been beaten down by this weak housing market and know exactly what prices homes in their communities are getting. They know that housing prices still haven’t reached bottom in many markets.

Tags | Illinois, Michigan, Tennessee

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