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More record home price declines
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
The March report(.pdf) for the S&P Case-Shiller Home Price Indexes shows a record decline of 19.1 percent in the quarterly National Home Price Index and a slightly less severe rate of decline for the 10-city and 20-city indexes. Price indexes for all 20 cities are shown below.
The top to bottom position on the right (corresponding to the order of the legend in the upper left to aid in viewing the data) saw a few changes last month, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, and Phoenix continuing to move down.
The index for Detroit now stands at 71.67, well off the bottom of the chart.
As shown below, Phoenix maintained its leadership role in year-over-year price declines with an astonishing 36.0 percent plunge. Las Vegas and San Francisco are not far behind with declines of more than 30 percent, all underlined in red.
Home prices in Minneapolis continue to tumble at an astonishing rate, down more than 6 percent in March with a year-over-year drop of 23.3 percent, sixth worst of the 20 cities. 
David M. Blitzer, Chairman of the Index Committee at Standard & Poor's, noted:Declines in residential real estate continued at a steady pace into March. All 20 metro areas are still showing negative annual rates of change in average home prices with nine of the metro areas having record annual declines. Seventeen metro areas recorded a monthly decline in March, with Minneapolis, Detroit and New York posting record monthly declines.
There's your "green shoot" for the day - March was the second month in the last six where neither index showed a record annual decline in home prices.
On a positive note, nine of MSAs are reporting a relative improvement in year-over-year returns and nine of the 20 metro areas saw an improvement in their monthly returns compared to February. Furthermore, this is the second month since October 2007 where the 10- and 20-City Composites did not post a record annual decline. Based on the March data, however, we see no evidence that that a recovery in home prices has begun.
3 comments:
And of course this data is *not* adjusted for inflation. If it were we would see that many of these markets (not just 1 or 2) are below historic average now!
Why is it that so many people think a home is actually an investment???
wow u just made my head spin ! and to think you actually believe what you just said ! amazing ! u muat watch CNBC! but you did get the investment part right !
The reason people see real estate as an investment is that it was a great way to make a killing if you flipped houses during the bubble.
Even if you didn't flip your equity could be accessed for whatnot if you refinanced.
Conventional wisdom said jump in, you can't lose.
Prices would just go up and up - in the short term.
That was the rub: When would things turn on their head and the music stop. Timing was everything as an investor always knows: buy low sell high.
That still applies. Sucks being caught off guard if you weren't paying attention. Wait for bottom in two or three years time and buy in low and look for the next bubble underwritten by our subsidized mortgage welfare state. Better yet, become the welfare cheat yourself and call yourself a bank holding company.
The only game in town that I don't see changing in the foreseeable future.
This is a form of redistribution of wealth that will be sanctioned by our government to keep the game going at all costs and you want to be on the winning side of an equation that no one will be able to challenge.
Real estate will once again recover and attract those willing to play the game and skim the profits off a rigged system.
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