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The Tucson housing market downturn hasn't bottomed out yet, but the end is near.

The low point on the fever chart will be logged sometime in the next nine months, said John Strobeck, housing analyst and owner of Bright Future Business Consultants.

Right now, a home buyer could have his or her pick of nearly 10,000 homes for sale.

"We've been saying this is a good time to buy because there's a breather in the market," said Rick Hodges, CEO of the Tucson Association of Realtors. "There's inventory out there and rates are still low, but that's not going to last very long."

Too bad so many people jumped in back in 2005.

"We grow at 2.6 to 2.9 percent annually and we did twice that in 2005, taking buyers who would have bought in 2008 out of the market," Strobeck said.

Still, the market here isn't awful. Around 7,000 homes will be sold this year, and that's around the same as in 2003 — before things really heated up, he said.

Plus, the average time a home is on the market is 61 days, which is close to average, Hodges said. And prices are still rising, although not at the pace they were two years ago. The average sales price was up 4.2 percent in May compared to a year earlier.

"I think we've seen the worst and it wasn't that bad," Hodges said.

But the downturn will have broad effects on jobs and the local economy. The sale of new homes contributed $2.3 billion to the local economy last year, and that might not reach $2 billion this year.

"A half a billion dollars taken out of the Tucson economy is a good chunk of money," Strobeck said. "That would be like closing Davis-Monthan (Air Force Base)."