S&P/Case-Shiller home-price index fall

From WSJ: "Further weighing on confidence the S&P/Case-Shiller home-price indexes, a closely watched gauge of U.S. home prices, saw prices fall further in February as slumping home sales and an increasing inventory of vacant homes further increased downward pressures on prices. Home Prices Decline "There is no sign of a bottom in the numbers," warned David M. Blitzer, chairman of S&P's... [more]

From WSJ: "Further weighing on confidence the S&P/Case-Shiller home-price indexes, a closely watched gauge of U.S. home prices, saw prices fall further in February as slumping home sales and an increasing inventory of vacant homes further increased downward pressures on prices. Home Prices Decline "There is no sign of a bottom in the numbers," warned David M. Blitzer, chairman of S&P's index committee, noting that all 20 metro areas the indexes study were in the red for February from a month earlier. According to the indexes, released Tuesday by ratings firm Standard & Poor's, home prices in 10 major metropolitan areas fell a record 13.6% in February from a year earlier and 2.8% from January. In 20 major metropolitan areas, home prices fell a record 12.7% from a year earlier and 2.6% from January. Not one city managed to avoid a February-over-January drop in prices, though Charlotte, N.C. -- the lone metropolitan area that showed annual growth in January -- eked out annual growth of 1.5% in February. No other region saw year-to-year growth. Las Vegas and Miami again were the weakest markets, as in January, posting February declines from a year earlier of 22.8% and 21.7%, respectively. Markets in the West were the biggest decliners month-to-month, with San Francisco, Las Vegas and Los Angeles performing the worst with drops in excess of 4%. S&P's report comes a week after the Commerce Department issued its own bleak report on housing. According to that report, sales of new, single-family homes slumped an unexpectedly sharp 8.5% in March to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 526,000, the lowest level since October 1991. Sales were down 37% from a year earlier. The Commerce Department also said in its report last week that the supply of new homes for sale soared to 11 months, the highest in almost three decades. The average and median price for a new home each fell at double-digit rates from a year earlier. And according to government data released Monday, the number of vacant homes in the U.S. increased by one million over the past year to a record 18.6 million. The vacancy rate for homes usually occupied by the owners rose to a record 2.3 million homes from 2.2 million in the fourth quarter and about 1 million more than was typical before the housing bubble burst." More interestingly, when you go to the S&P report itself, for the NY metro area, the price level as of Feb 2008 was last at that level in May/June 2005. In other words, prices are back to mid-2005 levels and still dropping. Caveat: the index includes Manhattan, but it's not broken out from a tristate aggregate; and also reflects only single family homes. Thus, this is, at best only a proxy for Manhattan. http://www2.standardandpoors.com/spf/pdf/index/cs_tieredprices_042952.xls [less]