Inventory: This is the market's wild card, said Delores Conway, director of the Casden Real Estate Economics Forecast at USC. For now, many sellers are choosing not to compete with builders of new homes, who are lowering prices and offering concessions. So they're waiting to list their homes. Conway expects the number of resale homes on the market to go up this spring, which it typically does. The unknown is how much. If it's a lot, that could force prices downward. "We will see a surge of inventory only if something negative happens to the job market," she said.
