U.S. home prices declined 2 percent in the third quarter of 2010, after rising 4.7 percent in the second quarter, according to data released today by Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller Home Price Index. Nationally, home prices saw a 1.5 percent year-over-year decrease, the report shows. While housing prices are still above their spring 2009 lows, the end of the tax incentives and still active foreclosures appear to be weighing down the market, experts said. “The national economy is still the number one issue for housing,” said David Blitzer, chairperson of the Index Committee at S&P. “Additionally, there is a large supply of houses on the market and further, hidden, supply due to delinquent mortgages, pending foreclosures or vacant homes.” TRD [more]

S&P/Case-Shiller report paints region as one of few bright spots in a weakened U.S. market

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Home prices in New York City area remained relatively unchanged in July, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index, released today. New York City home prices climbed 1.3 percent between June and July, to an index rating of 174.9. This score is up just .6 percent from July 2009′s index level. Nationwide, the July index showed positive momentum year-over-year, even as prices remained flat compared to the previous month. The index’s 20-city composite climbed 3.2 percent year-over-year, while the 10-city composite climbed 4.1 percent. Compared to June 2010, the 20-city composite and 10-city composites climbed .6 percent and .8 percent, respectively. Case-Shiller doesn’t include co-ops or condos in its report. TRD

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David Blitzer

New York City area home prices remained relatively flat in April, according to the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller Home Price Index, which measures monthly home price changes in 20 U.S. metropolitan regions. In April, New York City-area’s home prices declined 1 percent on the index, compared to April 2009, and dropped .3 percent compared to March. Some New York City area real estate experts have questioned the report’s validity in their market, since it doesn’t include co-ops or condos in its report. Nationwide, despite the uptick in market activity due to the expiration of the first-time homebuyer tax credit, home prices showed only modest improvement in April, compared to the same month a year earlier. The 10-city composite was up 4.6 percent in the report, while the 20-city composite was up 3.8 percent over April 2009. David Blitzer, chairman of the index committee at Standard & Poor’s, suggested that the improvement in nationwide data was due in large part to a drastic improvement in California — where San Diego and San Francisco both saw double-digit improvements year-over-year — and not a nationwide shift. “Home price levels remain close to the April 2009 lows,” Blitzer said. “Consistent and sustained boosts to economic growth from housing may have to wait to next year.”

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David Blitzer

New York City area home prices remained relatively flat in April, according to the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller Home Price Index, which measures monthly home price changes in 20 U.S. metropolitan regions. In April, New York City-area’s home prices declined 1 percent on the index, compared to April 2009, and dropped .3 percent compared to March. Some New York City area real estate experts have questioned the report’s validity in their market, since it doesn’t include co-ops or condos in its report. Nationwide, despite the uptick in market activity due to the expiration of the first-time homebuyer tax credit, home prices showed only modest improvement in April, compared to the same month a year earlier. The 10-city composite was up 4.6 percent in the report, while the 20-city composite was up 3.8 percent over April 2009. David Blitzer, chairman of the index committee at Standard & Poor’s, suggested that the improvement in nationwide data was due in large part to a drastic improvement in California — where San Diego and San Francisco both saw double-digit improvements year-over-year — and not a nationwide shift. “Home price levels remain close to the April 2009 lows,” Blitzer said. “Consistent and sustained boosts to economic growth from housing may have to wait to next year.”

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Click image for larger version (Source: Standard & Poor’s and Fiserv)

Home prices nationwide showed modest year-over-year improvement in February, according to the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices, which measure home prices in 10- and 20-city composites. The two indices saw home prices increase 1.4 percent and .6 percent, respectively, over February 2009. [more]

Jonathan Miller

From the April issue: The words may change, but it’s always a variation on the same tune: Every couple of months, someone sings the song of Case-Shiller, the widely cited home price index. The question for New Yorkers is whether it’s a local theme song. While there is no question that the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller 20-city housing index is an influential measure of the country’s shifting real estate fortunes, some New York-based number crunchers argue that it says almost nothing about the city’s — particularly Manhattan’s — real estate reality. Still, New York City publications often cite the index (one recent story ran under the headline “Housing Index: New York home prices decline 10 percent”). [more]

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The pace of home price declines slowed in New York City and nationwide in January, but fewer U.S. cities experienced monthly gains, according to the latest data from Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller Home Price Index (click here for the full report).

The New York metro area registered a 0.3 percent month-over-month decrease in January, an improvement over the 0.7 percent monthly price decline registered a month earlier. Prices in the region were down 5.3 percent from January 2009, but in comparison to other cities, New York’s residential real estate market has held up well during the downturn, with prices still up 70 percent over their January 2000 levels.

When compared with January 2009, nationwide price declines were minimal overall, down only 0.7 percent on a year-over-year basis, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller 20-city composite index. Meanwhile, the 10-city composite index was unchanged since last year. It’s the first time since January 2007 that prices have been so close to increasing, rather than decreasing, according to the report, and they are now at approximately the same levels as in the fall of 2003. Still, the 10- and 20-city composites were 33.5 percent and 32.6 percent, respectively, off their mid-2006 peaks. TRD Comments

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Ever since the housing bubble burst, real estate industry bigwigs, regulators and policy makers have been working to get lenders back on their feet, curtail foreclosures, and above all, make sure none of this ever happens again. Robert Shiller, the Yale University economist and co-founder of the S&P/Case-Shiller home-price index, believes efforts on that last front may be partially in vain. Market bubbles, Shiller wrote in a Newsweek column this week, will inevitably be repeated because they are the byproduct of the psychological impulse to “buy into ‘new era’ stories that exaggerate how much the world has improved.” If anything, the tendency to give into what Shiller calls the “herd mentality” has intensified with the advent of social media like Twitter and Facebook, he argued. Even in the immediate aftermath of the subprime bust, a recent Case-Shiller survey found that Americans’ mid- and long-term expectations were for prices to increase, in direct contradiction to Shiller’s findings for home prices over the past century. [Newsweek]

Following yesterday’s release of the S&P/Case-Shiller housing data, CNBC sat down with Cliff Draughn, president and CIO of Excelsia Investment Advisors, and Todd Colvin, vice president at MF Global to discuss whether the feared second dip in home prices is a real threat. Colvin said yesterday’s numbers need to be put into seasonal perspective. “We have to remember what time of year it is right now. This is probably the worst time to be selling a house whether the market is in the tank or it’s on the highs,” he noted. Still, he said the housing market has not yet been given enough time to stabilize. Only after “a period of stabilization where we don’t see much housing growth or decline” will we finally begin to see recovery, Colvin said. Draughn, for his part, predicted weak growth and high interest rates — in a stagflation-type environment — moving into 2010. [more]