CoreLogic’s chief economist Mark Fleming says housing statistics and the duration of the downturn to date indicate 2012 may be the year the housing market begins to turn the corner.

In the first release of CoreLogic’s new MarketPulse newsletter Wednesday, Fleming explained his rationale for such an assessment.

He notes that housing is an industry with long business cycles. Regional housing recessions have typically taken anywhere from three to five years to find their bottom, and Fleming says the national housing recession has behaved similarly in that it has bounced along a bottom for the past two years.

Fleming points out that housing affordability is rising dramatically due to a combination of home price deflation and rock-bottom mortgage rates. In fact, he says, after adjusting for inflation, this has been a “lost decade” for housing as prices are the same as at the beginning of the millennium.

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