Here’s betting on a V-shaped recovery for home prices here in Massachusetts.

Despite a now years-long real estate downturn that has shattered housing markets nationwide, we still have some of the highest home prices in the country. And it appears our lofty prices, after a breather of sorts, are poised to take off yet again.

A number of upscale suburbs gained pricing altitude during an otherwise grim 2011, according to data obtained from The Warren Group, publisher of Banker & Tradesman.

Predicting that anything will rise in the real estate market these days is unfashionable, of course, unless it is foreclosures or short sales. And the conventional wisdom says prices will stabilize and bump around the bottom for several years, just like the 1990s, before starting to get traction.

But as one Wall Street wag once noted, history does indeed repeat itself, just never in the same way.

No ’90s Re-Run

There are a couple big reasons why we are not likely to see a repeat of the ’90s, when home prices flatlined for several years after the erstwhile Massachusetts Miracle went bust.

The Great Recession was truly traumatic, no matter where in this country you rode it out.

But arguably, Massachusetts took a harder hit in the early 1990s, when a relatively shallow national recession hit New England with the force of a mini Depression.

The unemployment rate soared above 8 percent in 1991 and stayed in that territory through 1993. And our bevy of regional, Boston-based banks – since largely scooped up in mergers – suddenly buckled under the weight of rash condo and office buildings loans doled out like candy during the boom years of the 1980s.

It took years for lenders to dig out and the local economy to get on its feet, years in which home prices, which crashed around the same time as the regional economy, skidded around the bottom.

By contrast, the jobless rate in Massachusetts today is now down to 6.8 percent – and falling fast.

And while the early 1990s saw a painful contraction in the local defense industry, our current stable of leading industries – biotech, high-tech and health care – are bright spots nationally.

There is a second big difference, too.

Back in the 19’90s, we had a significant amount of new homes and condos to burn off after a surge in residential construction in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

As it turned out, the 1980s appear increasingly to have been a last hurrah for local home builders, a time when tens of thousands of new homes were built across Massachusetts. While new construction has bumped up here and there over the past two decades, it has consistently fallen short of what’s needed to replenish an aging housing stock.

From 1960 to 1975, the size of the Greater Boston housing market rose by 27 percent, according to a report from Harvard’s Rappaport Institute. But from 1990 to 2006, the local housing market expanded by a relatively paltry 9 percent.

Nor, like many other states, do we have a mountain of foreclosures to work through.

Sales of bank-owned properties accounted for just 3.8 percent of the single-family market last year in Massachusetts, according to The Warren Group, compared to a third or more in many hard-hit Sunbelt states.

Bargain Hunting

The 1990s were bad years for sellers – I remember my parents taking a bath trying to unload my childhood home in Norfolk. But frankly, it wasn’t so bad for homebuyers who found themselves increasingly locked out of the market as real estate prices soared during the sunnier 1980s. However, given the relatively robust local economy, and years of anemic building levels, buyers may not get the same kind of breather this time around. Already price pressure is building up in some upscale suburbs, with some towns posting significant gains in 2011.

Newton, Concord, Lexington, Dover, Sherborn, Weston, Wayland, Sudbury and Acton all saw home prices rise tom some degree in 2011 – ranging from 1 percent in Lexington to more than 13 percent in Dover.

And bidding wars are even erupting in less affluent suburbs like Natick, where Brendan Cavalier and his wife Emily lost out in a bidding war for a 1950s colonial that eventually fetched $450,000.

“I haven’t seen a bargain in months – no house has hit the market that’s made me drop everything and run out there to go see it,” Cavalier said. “It’s all fixer-uppers, interior decoration trapped in the 1970s, houses built into hillsides, bizarre additions and renovations, crowded lots with neighbors on top of them.”

And unfortunately for buyers like Cavalier, the price escalation machine may already be kicking in once again, especially in always pricey Greater Boston.