Wikinvest Wire

Phoenix-Las Vegas death match continues

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

The September 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 18.6 percent and 17.4 percent, respectively. Price indices for all 20 cities are shown below.
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). As such, the legend order indicates which cities have managed to hold onto the largest real estate price gains since 2000.

Congratulations New York!

You've just surpassed Washington D.C. as the metro area that has held onto home price gains the best in this decade. The bad news is that, with all the recent troubles on Wall Street, this may not last that long.

Not surprisingly, Phoenix and Las Vegas continue to lead the way down, year-over-year home price declines in both areas pushing past 31 percent in September as indicated in red in the table below - the death match continues.

A few other areas are also threatening to crack the 30+ percent annual decline threshold as indicated in blue, notably, San Francisco, an area where the annual price decline worsened to 29.5 percent.
IMAGE Two areas showed month-to-month improvement - Cleveland and Boston - while home prices in Dallas were unchanged from August. Cleveland was the only region where the annual home price decline improved from a year ago, from -6.6 percent in August to -6.4 percent in September.

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

The turmoil in the financial markets is placing further downward pressure on a housing market already weakened by its own fundamentals.

All three aggregate indices and 13 of the 20 metro areas are reporting new record rates of decline. Looking at the returns of the U.S. National Index, prices are back to where they were in early 2004. As of September 2008, the 10-City Composite is down 23.4% from its peak, the 20-City Composite is down 21.8% and the National Composite is down 21.0%
You'd think that things couldn't get any worse for home prices, but they probably will.

ooo

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Meantime, in the Old World:-

"The Mayor of London launched an extraordinary personal attack on Gordon Brown's handling of the financial crisis today.

Boris Johnson accused the Prime Minister of behaving like a drunk taking a "frantic and unprecedented gamble" with the economy.

"He is like some sherry-crazed old dowager who has lost the family silver at roulette, and who now decides to double up by betting the house as well," the Mayor said."

Anthony Alfidi said...

LV, LA, SF, San Diego, Miami, Phoenix. The biggest declines are all in Sunbelt states. All that raw, empty land looked too good for developers to resist. It will be raw land again in a few years. The New New Deal needs open acreage to put its solar mirror fields.

Anonymous said...

I'm waiting for your graph of southern CA counties' median house prices this month to see if the carnage continues. Will San Diego hit 1999 prices before this is over?

Tim said...

I missed that update when we were out of town early-last week. I can't tell you how far back SD home prices have gone because my data stops at January of 2002, at which time the median price was $357K. It is now $323K.

Anonymous said...

As a Realtor who just happens to live in Las Vegas, I think these figures only tell half the story. If you go and look at the figures (This guy publishes them weekly (mostly)), you will find that the available inventory in Vegas has dropped substantially year over year, and months supply has dropped along with it. Sure, prices are down. Low prices have stimulated demand. We aren't at the point where prices are going up yet, but we are at the point where homes are selling for very near asking price.

IMAGE

  © Blogger template Newspaper by Ourblogtemplates.com 2008

Back to TOP