National Association of Realtor's Chief Economist, Lawrence Yun, predicts that home sales will improve more than 20% for the first half of this year over the same period last year. Furthermore, Yun predicts that interest rates will not rise to more than 5.8% which is still very low. Even unemployment is showing improvement on a national scale. Employers reported about 11,000 job losses at the end of November 2009 - the smaller tally in a long time. It's sad that this huge number is considered small but Texas and especially Houston is in far better shape than the national average!