 TITLE: Is a Recession a Good Time to Buy a House? CONTENT: Challenges When Buying a Home During a Recession\n------------------------------------------------\n*   **Potential difficulty selling your current home:** If you need to sell your current house in order to buy a new one, the pricing trends that benefit you as a buyer may work against you as a seller. Depending on your local housing market, you may need to be prepared for lowball bids or longer selling cycles. Working with an experienced real estate professional can be helpful when pricing your home to sell as well as when submitting purchase offers on a new house. If selling now sounds unappealing, consider keeping your current house and renting it out (as long as you have funds for a down payment on a new home). Turning it into a rental property could spare you having to sell in a slow market and provide you with an additional income stream that lenders may appreciate. (Be careful, though, since rent delinquencies tend to increase during recessions.)\n*   **Tighter lending requirements:** Rising unemployment and overall lower household income often accompany recessions, and that typically means more borrowers have difficulty covering their debts. Lenders, in turn, often respond with greater caution about issuing new loans. They may give greater scrutiny to loan applications, increase the minimum credit scores required to qualify for loans, and increase down payment requirements on certain loans, including mortgages. END