More record home price declines

The October report(.pdf) for the S&P Case-Shiller Home Price Indices shows the 10-City and 20-City Composite Home Price Indices at new record annual declines of 19.1 percent and 18.0 percent, respectively. Price indices for all 20 cities are shown below.
Recall that to aid in viewing this graphic, the order of the legend (upper left) reflects the top-to-bottom position of all 20 cities for the current month (far right).

New York maintains its lead over Washington for having best held its price gains over the past nine years, but that may change in 2009 as financial sector job losses continue to mount in New York, creating something of bailout boom in Washington.

Phoenix and Las Vegas continue to lead the way down, but now San Francisco has joined the select group of areas with year-over-year price declines of more than 30 percent as indicated below in red.

Annual declines of 20 percent or greater are indicated in blue. As if it didn't have enough other things to worry about, Detroit joined that list in October with Tampa looking ready to make the same move next month.
Not a single area showed a month-to-month improvement, in contrast to last month when both Boston and Cleveland posted small gain and Dallas was unchanged.

David M. Blitzer, Chairman of the Index Committee at Standard & Poor's, noted:

The bear market continues; home prices are back to their March, 2004 levels. Both composite indices and 14 of the 20 metro areas are reporting new record rates of decline. As of October 2008, the 10-City Composite is down 25.0% from its mid-2006 peak, and the 20-City Composite is down 23.4%.

In October, we also saw three new markets enter the ‘double-digit’ club. Atlanta, Seattle and Portland are reporting annual rates of decline of 10.5%, 10.2% and 10.1%, respectively. While not yet experiencing as severe a contraction as in the Sunbelt, it seems the Pacific Northwest and Mid-Atlantic South is not immune to the overall demise in the housing market.

With the level of price declines that have already been seen, you'd think that things can't get any worse, but they do. You'd at least think that the year-over-year price declines would start to ease up a little bit, but they don't - new records are being set every month.