No progress for Midwest's housing market

Things continue to look bad for the Midwest housing market. Seven of the lowest performing major markets in the nation are from the Midwest and Detroit leads the pack. Sean McSweeney is with Clear Capital, a national real estate valuation company. McSweeney says while Detroit faces many challenges, there are still reasons Detroit home owners should be hopeful. 

Detroit was the bottom performing market of our top 50 that we track over the last quarter. However Detroit's down 6.2 percent over the year which, while it isn’t a great number, isn’t far off from the national average which is 5 percent down.

McSweeney says he does not expect home prices in the Midwest to improve this year. 

The Midwest has obviously been through a lot of challenging times in the past few years and I don’t think there’s going to be any huge surprises in 2011 in terms of home price declines but we shouldn’t expect any significant gains.

This is the first time in two years home buyers are not getting tax credits to boost the housing market. McSweeney says the absence of those incentives may cause buyers to sit on the sidelines during the high home-buying summer months.