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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]

Home prices nationwide fell 19.1 percent in the first quarter of 2009
compared to the same period of 2008, according to the
S&P/Case-Shiller home price index for March and the entire first
quarter, released today. The decline is the largest in the index’s
21-year history. In New York, home prices fell 2.5 percent between
February and March of this year, a record drop, and 11.8 percent
year-over-year. The index does not include condos or co-ops, which make
up the bulk of homes in Manhattan. Nationwide, average home prices have
fallen 32.2 percent since their peak in the second quarter of 2006. TRD [more]

S&P/Case-Shiller
reports that in its 20-city composite, prices fell 18.6 percent during
the month of February from a month earlier, a slight improvement from January when prices
fell by 19 percent from the month before. February is the first month since October 2007 when
the composite did not post a record annual decline. New York’s prices
fell 1.6 percent between January and February, and 10.2 percent
compared to the same time last year. The index does not include condos
or co-ops, which makes up the bulk of homes in Manhattan. David Blitzer, chairman of the index committee at S&P,
said all 20 metro areas recorded a monthly decline in February, but 16
of the 20 areas saw improvements in their monthly returns and nine
areas showed improvements in their annual returns. TRD