Denver home prices not so dire
5% drop looks good compared with U.S.
Denver again fared much better than much of the nation as home prices dropped at the sharpest rate in two decades during the year ending March 31, a closely watched index showed Tuesday.
Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller said its national home price index fell 14.1 percent for the 12-month period – the biggest annual drop since its inception in 1988 – but prices in Denver fell only 5 percent.
The narrower indices also set record declines. The 20-city index tumbled 14.4 percent, the most since that index was started in 2001. The 10-city index plunged 15.3 percent, a record in its 20-year history.
“There are very few silver linings that one can see in the data,” said David Blitzer, chairman of S&P’s index committee. “Most of the nation appears to remain on a downward path.”
Nineteen of the 20 metro areas reported annual declines, with 15 of them posting record lows. Six metro areas lost more than 20 percent.
Las Vegas had the worst quarterly performance, falling 25.9 percent from the same period a year ago, followed by Miami and Phoenix. Only Charlotte, N.C., stayed above water, gaining less than 1 percent over the previous year.
In another report issued Tuesday, sales of new homes rose in April for the first time in six months, though the unexpected increase still left activity near the lowest level in 17 years.
The Commerce Department reported that sales of new homes rose 3.3 percent in April to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 526,000 units. But the government revised March activity lower to show an even bigger drop of 11 percent to an annual rate of 509,000, which was the weakest pace for sales since April 1991.
Downward trend
More bad news on the housing market: Released Tuesday, the S&P/Case-Shiller home-price indexes showed home prices across the country fell 14 percent in March from a year earlier, representing the largest drop in the 20-year history of the indexes. Denver fared much better, dropping 5 percent.
* Here’s information from 20 metro areas Case-Shiller tracks:
Metro area Year-over-year change
Las Vegas -25.9%
Miami -24.6%
Phoenix -23.0%
Los Angeles -21.7%
San Diego -20.5%
San Francisco -20.2%
Tampa, Fla. -19.6%
Detroit -17.9%
Washington -14.7%
Minneapolis -14.1%
Chicago -10.0%
Cleveland -9.5%
New York -7.4%
Atlanta -6.5%
Boston -5.9%
Denver -5.0%
Seattle -4.4%
Portland, Ore. -4.0%
Dallas -3.3%
Charlotte, N.C. 0.8%
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2008/may/27/denver-home-prices-not-so-dire/
