Are interest rates low enough to get the housing market moving again?

Yesterday, Madison's Channel 3000 News interviewed Professor Stephen Malpezzi on the outlook on the housing market given historically low mortgage interest rates. (Homebuyers Take Advantage Of Low Mortgage Rates, Aug 19, 2011 - video embedded below)

While the added incentive will likely pickup the housing market, experts don't expect it to be enough to pull the U.S. out of its slump."Getting employment back up is going to have a lot to do with getting that housing market problem healed and getting us back on track," said Steve Malpezzi, a business professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Professor Morris A. Davis was interviewed on Wisconsin Public Radio on Monday (Mortgage Rates Drop, But Getting a Good Rate Can Be Tough, Aug 15, 2011 + audio): while mortgage rates have reached record lows,

Morris Davis, Associate Professor in the Department of Real Estate at UW-Madison's School of Business, says there's a catch, "It's harder to get a mortgage than it used to be. Underwriting standards are much more strict than they were just a few years ago."

However, (from Channel 3000)

What Malpezzi does caution against right now is flipping a home. He said home values are still fluctuating and could even dip, so it would be difficult to buy a home, fix it up and sell it for a profit within a couple of years.