Real estate professionals have an increasingly positive outlook for the direction of home values, according to a third quarter 2012 survey by HomeGain, a website that provides online home valuations. The survey reported that 51percent of realtors expect home values to increase, compared to 48 percent last quarter.

Location, location, location… The survey found that real estate professionals expect to see home prices rise the most over the next six months in Colorado, California, Virginia, Maryland, and Washington.

On the flip side, realtors said they expected to see home prices to fall over the next six months in Ohio, North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Arizona, according to the survey.

Home owners were less optimistic than real estate professionals; only 34 percent of home owners said they expected home prices to increase, which is up from than the 27 percent who thought so last quarter.

Expanding the time horizon out two years, both real estate professionals and homeowners’ levels of optimism increased. “Eighty percent of real estate professionals and 62 percent of homeowners think home values will increase in the next two years,” according to HomeGain.

Tools You Can Use to Find Local Real Estate Information

Looking for home values in a specific city? MuniNetGuide has partnered with HomeGain to provide local real estate information in two ways – via links to local realtor pages, and through HomeGain’s home valuation tools for buyers and sellers. These links can be accessed through our school profile pages. Here’s how to get there:

1.  Use the MuniNetGuide.com search tool (to the right of the map on the home page) to search for a specific city.

2.  Click on the city’s profile page (e.g., Pueblo, Colorado)

3.  Scroll down the page, below the map, zip codes until you see a list of schools. Click on a specific school (e.g., Belmont Elementary School).

4.  Just below the map showing the school’s location, you will see a picture of a home, accompanied by a link that says “Search for homes in and near Pueblo, Colorado.” Click on this link, and you will be taken to a local realtor’s website, showing current real estate listings in the area.

5.  OR, scroll to the bottom of the list of schools to see an interactive tool by HomeGain that allows you to get an instant home valuation after entering some basic information about the home and location.