U.S. housing prices will continue to fall in 2012, but the rate of decline is slowing, according to two separate Zillow.com reports cited by Bloomberg News.

Thanks in part to foreclosures, housing prices will fall further until at least 2013, according to a survey of 109 economists, despite record low mortgage rates. Yesterday’s existing home sales report supported that belief, showing prices declined 3.5 percent in November. When values do rise, the same economists said they probably wouldn’t match the prices recorded prior to the housing collapse.

Prices are already down 31 percent from their July 2006 peak, the most recent Case-Shiller Index shows, and they will drop another 7 percent, according to Scott Simon, head of mortgage and asset-backed securities at California-based Pacific Investment Management. [more]

From the August issue: The gulf between New York City’s real estate market and the rest of the country has always been wide. But that disconnect appears to be growing.

“Manhattan seems to be one of the lucky ones,” said Jonathan Miller, president and CEO of Miller Samuel, who called the Big Apple one of “the best housing markets in the country, relatively.”

For example, Manhattan’s median residential sale price in the second quarter was only 17 percent below the market peak in 2008, according to the most recent report from brokerage Prudential Douglas Elliman, which is prepared by Miller. That’s an improvement from the worst depths of the downturn, when Manhattan prices were 25 to 30 percent below the high, said Miller, who also does market research for Las Vegas, Washington, D.C., Baltimore and Miami. [more]

Recent data suggests that New York City’s economy is recovering more quickly than that of the nation, though not quite as quickly as Manhattan’s commercial real estate investment market, according to Sam Chandan, chief economist for Real Capital Analytics. Writing in the Observer, and citing the New York Fed’s Coincident Economic Index, a report that aggregates statistics relating to current economic activity in New York City, Chandan said the most recent recession was not as severe as the one that preceded it in 2001. This discovery contrasts with national statistics, which show a milder recession at the beginning of the previous decade. Comments

• Tweet

From the April issue: Is the Manhattan real estate market finally headed for recovery? Most experts agree that with tight lending and a large “shadow inventory” of unsold new condos, a full market recovery is a long way off. In fact, if interest rates begin to rise, prices may fall even more, though any further decreases are expected to be less severe than those that shook the post-Lehman Brothers market.

Still, it’s obvious to brokers, buyers and sellers that there’s been a vast improvement in the market even in the last few weeks.

This month, The Real Deal looked at the key factors that are helping the market to start the difficult process of a rebound. [more]