Phoenix Home Prices off 1.65%, S&P Says

Phoenix prices were down 1.65 percent in the year ended in March. It's the third straight month of annualized price drops, the longest losing streak since 1991. Phoenix prices are 4.64 percent off their peak, according to S&P/Case-Shiller.

This index tracks "repeat sales" rather than a median price for single-family residences in the region. That means it tracks the typical gain or loss a local seller experienced, then combines all those results into a two-month moving average of the math. This index is the base for commodity-style trading of house prices at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

As a comparision, look at Las Vegas and Los Angeles:

• Home prices in Los Angeles and Orange counties were down 1.36 percent in the year ended in March, a price index from Standard & Poor's and Case-Shiller says today. That's the second straight decline and worst performance since 1996. This index is now down 3.42 percent from its August peak. A year ago, it was showing 18.29 percent annualized gains.
• Las Vegas prices are down 1.65 percent in the year ended in March. It's the first back-to-back annualized drop since 1993. Vegas prices are 2.65 percent off their peak, according to S&P/Case-Shiller.

A 10-city national index was down 1.88 percent in the year ended in March. Says Robert J. Shiller, chief economist at MacroMarkets LLC: “The fall of the National Index into negative territory, after more than 15 years of positive annual growth, is a reaffirmation of the pullback in the U.S. residential real estate market. ... The National Index was yielding solid returns as recently as a year ago. Q1 2006 growth rates were up 11.5% vs. Q1 2005, a sharp contrast to the returns we are seeing today.” (Read more HERE)

"We still don't see anything that looks like a clear bottom," S&P index committee chairman David Blitzer said. "We're still headed down." The S&P/Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price Index showed the 1.4 percent drop in the price for sales of existing single-family homes in metropolitan markets in nine U.S. census divisions.

For March, S&P's 10-city and 20-city composite indices, which measure a smaller number of cities than the national index, also fell, by 1.9 percent and 1.4 percent respectively over the last year. When compared to February, the March sales figures show that 16 of 20 cities reported prices had dropped or remained flat, S&P said.

And, from The Big Picture : Housing Freefall Continues Unabated

Housing Bubble and Real Estate Market Tracker fromSA for 5/29