Mortgage ABC

Home Prices Keep Sliding

Wall Street Journal summarizes the current status of the housing market. It appears that things can get worse before they get better. Seattle's housing market remains strong, which makes it hard to assess whether my decision in late 2005 to sell my house is wise marketing timing or not.

The National Association of Realtors yesterday reported the biggest drop in home prices since the trade group began compiling price data in 1968. Specifically, the association said the median price for home sales completed in September was $220,000, down 2.2% from a year earlier. That matched a revised 2.2% decline in August. In addition to being the largest price drops in at least 38 years, the back-to-back declines are the first time median home prices have fallen since 1995.

Other data gathered by The Wall Street Journal show large inventories of unsold homes and declining price trends in most major metropolitan areas.

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Despite the recent drop-off, house prices remain far above the levels of five years ago, and they continue to rise in some areas, including Seattle, Houston and Raleigh, N.C. But they are falling sharply in other places. In Massachusetts, the median price for single-family homes in September was down 8.3% from a year before, according to Warren Group Inc., a publisher and data collector in Boston. In Phoenix, the median price dropped 4.8% in September, the local Realtors association reported.

In some areas, prices are only just beginning to fall back toward realistic levels, says Thomas Lawler, a housing economist in Vienna, Va. He believes that prices could fall more than 10% from their peak levels in markets such as Sacramento, Calif.; San Diego; Las Vegas; Reno, Nev.; Phoenix and parts of northern Virginia and Florida.