If you’re looking for one bright spot in Connecticut’s sluggish housing market it may very well be sales of lower-priced homes.

Sales of single-family homes priced $299,000 and lower have actually climbed this year.

A total of 10,972 homes in that price range sold in the first three quarters, up 2.1 percent from 10,748 during the same timeframe in 2008, according to The Warren Group.

The increase may sound pretty insignificant, especially since home sales in this price range are actually off a whopping 45 percent from the 19,991 sales transactions recorded in 2003.

But the year-over-year increase comes as sales of homes in all price ranges tumbled 11.3 percent.

And sales of high-end homes have slumped even more.

Homes with $700,000-plus price tag have plunged 37 percent so far this year.

By now, most real estate industry professionals have already heard about the rosy forecast that the chief economist of the National Association of Realtors has made.

Lawrence Yun, NAR’s head economist, predicts that home prices will increase between 3 percent and 5 percent next year while existing-home sales will jump nearly 14 percent to 5.7 million.

Yun says barring any “unforeseen events impacting the economy”, factors like the expansion of the tax credit and the drop in housing inventory are helping to stabilize the housing market and should lead to its recovery.

But I can hear the skeptics now: what about the fact that unemployment is expected to increase through the first half of 2010 and may even reach 11 percent?

And I can appreciate the skeptics’ concerns.

NAR’s chief leaders have been criticized for their overly optimistic forecasts and their failure to acknowledge the last housing bubble. In fact, some bloggers and web sites emerged in recent years devoted to ridiculing Yun’s predecessor, David Lereah, who authored a book titled “Are You Missing the Real Estate Boom?”.

What are your thoughts? Do you think Massachusetts home prices will increase next year?  

Homeowners with two mortgages or those who used 100 percent financing to purchase their residences and are now trying to negotiate a short sale may be facing even more trouble in the future.

Short sales, when a property is sold for less than what is owed on the mortgage, have become more common because properties values have plunged and more homeowners are facing foreclosure.

Short sale deals involving a primary mortgage and second mortgage have always been tougher to hammer out.

But in the past, homeowners with two loans who were trying to avoid foreclosure have been able to negotiate short sales deals where the second mortgage holder gets a small amount or nothing at all.  

Now, second mortgage holders aren’t as willing to agree to such deals.

A recent story in BusinessWeek noted that Bank of America, is requesting homeowners to fork over as much as 5 percent of the sale proceeds in transactions where the bank holds the second mortgage.

Those are tough terms for already-stretched borrowers to accept.

President Obama and Congress delivered an early Christmas gift to real estate agents with the extension and expansion of the homebuyer tax credit.

The expansion comes at a time when the real estate industry is entering what is traditionally one of the slowest seasons for home sales.

Selling and buying usually slow down right around November and into the holidays.

Understandably, not many people are eager to make such a big purchase in between shopping, decorating, baking and worrying about family bickering during holiday gatherings.

But now agents, appraisers, and real estate attorneys are gearing up for the flood of homebuyers they’re expecting to take advantage of the tax credit.

The Hartford Courant recently reported that local real estate experts are attributing a 35 percent increase in pending home sales in Greater Hartford during the month of October to the tax credit.

Just days before the tax credit was extended, The Warren Group reported that sales of single-family homes and condos were essentially flat in September compared to a year ago.

September didn’t produce the types of gains in the single-family home market that the previous two months did.

It will be interesting to see the October and November sales reports to see whether the tax credit had the desired effect.

Single-family home sales in Fairfield County have plunged to the lowest level in over two decades.

There were 3,756 home sales in the first three quarters of 2009. That’s 18 percent lower than a year earlier and 61 percent below the 9,659 homes that traded during the same months a decade ago, according to The Warren Group.

This year has seen the fewest home sales transactions since The Warren Group started tracking Connecticut’s residential real estate sales in 1988.

Median home prices have also taken a dive.

The median selling price for Fairfield County stood at $450,000 through the end of September, which is the lowest it’s been in five years.

In 2007, the median price for the first three quarters reached $603,000.

Still, William Pitt Sotheby’s International released a report this week showing that pending home sales in Fairfield County during the third quarter shot up 45 percent from the third quarter of 2008.

We’ll have to wait and see whether those pending sales translate into an increase in completed home sales in the following quarters …