Some new numbers indicate that the housing crisis in Tucson may be near the bottom. Nobody disputes that home values are down, but everyone is looking for when the market will turn and get better. The market can’t improve until it hits rock bottom, and a new report out on August 12 claims that may be happening right now.

However, homeowners who’ve had their houses on the market for some time aren’t quite as optimistic. When she put her home up for sale 10 months ago, Donae McGrath was feeling positive. She even turned down one offer for the northwest Tucson house with a mountain view, and then the housing market took a nosedive.

“I thought it was going to start to level out or creep up, but it’s only gotten worse since then,” she says. And McGrath of all people knows just how bad it is. She spent 20 years in Real Estate, selling seven homes of her own. “In listing them, they’ve maybe been on the market for 1 to 4 weeks max, and they’ve always sold right away, so this is a brand new experience for me,” she says.

But if a new report from the Association of Tucson Realtors is any indication, her luck could improve. They say the number of houses listed on the market has leveled off in the last several months, and the selling price of homes has finally stopped falling.

“Just recently in the last week, it’s really been picking up,” says Bank of Tucson President and CEO Michael Hannley. “If anything, we’ve kind of bottomed out in the Real Estate market, so things are kind of stabilizing.”

But as a homeowner who believes she should get what her home is worth, McGrath is still cautious. “I hope and pray it doesn’t get much worse,” she says. “It’s going to take at least a year-and-a-half, I think, to level off even to where it was a couple years ago.”

Realtors admit that one of the many reasons fewer houses are on the market this month is that some people got fed up and pulled their houses off the market. That’s something Donae McGrath is considering, but she’s still hoping the market has indeed leveled off and will begin to improve.