Watching the Housing Market

We have been casually looking for other places to move to over the past year, mostly to get out of a big and growing bigger every day city.  It seems to be a very good time to make our move as our local news keeps noting that the housing market may be getting too hot--like to the point of imploding like it did here about ten years ago.  

Back then there were so many buyers bidding up the prices of houses and there was so much building (in addition to other financial shenanigans like maxing out home equity loans and offering home loans to people who in no way could afford them) that it eventually reached a critical point and the market imploded.  Over less than a year many houses lost half of their value or more which then caused a lot of foreclosures and people just walking away from homes that they owed much more on that what they were worth.

We bought a house here when housing values were nearly at their lowest and since then our house has more than doubled in value.  We would love to sell our house here and use the proceeds from the sale to pay cash for a new house in a place where homes are much cheaper.

So far it looks like the south may be the place to go.  Tennessee, Georgia, and North Carolina all seem to have a lot of new houses being built with prices that are half the cost of buying a similar house here (like a four bed, three bath house for $250k which would now cost upwards of $450k here).  I guess that is sort of "playing the market" when it comes to housing but to be retired with a completely paid off house seems like a very good move to me!  Now to decide where to move to...