Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Charlotte home prices fall

Home prices in Charlotte and other major cities fell again in November, reflecting how prices are still under pressure despite signs the overall housing market may be stabilizing, according to a report released Tuesday.

The Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller Home Price Index, which measures home prices in 20cities, fell 1.3 percent in November from October and 3.7 percent from a year ago.
Prices in the Charlotte metropolitan area fell 0.5 percent from October and dropped 1.9 percent from November 2010, according to the index, which tracks repeat sales.

Nineteen of 20 cities saw prices decline on a monthly basis, with Phoenix being the only city to post an increase.

Atlanta continues to suffer among the most, posting a nearly 12 percent decline from November 2010.

Five cities, including Charlotte, however, saw their annual rates improve, even though home prices remain below last year's.

Economists and local real estate experts say they think area home prices will continue to fall this year and beyond.

That's because the market must cope with a large supply of available houses, including distressed ones. Foreclosed homes accounted for 20 percent of U.S. home sales between July and September, according to RealtyTrac. In a healthy market, foreclosures typically account for five percent or fewer of sales.

Additional pressure also comes from a looming amount of shadow inventory that could hit the market. Shadow inventory includes homes that are in the foreclosure process, likely to enter the foreclosure process or owned by banks but not on the market. These homes are not included in official inventory statistics.

Nationally, analysts estimate shadow inventory could range from 1.5 million to more than 6 million homes. An Observer analysis found Mecklenburg County had more than 16,000 homes in shadow inventory in October, compared to roughly 7,800 homes officially on the market.

"Despite continued low interest rates and better real GDP growth in the fourth quarter, home prices continue to fall," David Blitzer, chairman of the index committee at S&P Indices, said in a statement.

Overall, the index is down around 33 percent from its 2006 peak, and prices are close to those seen in mid-2003.

For more information go to: www.homeprice.standardandpoors.com

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Long overdue economic corrections don't just happen and then go away. It's going to be like this for a long time.

Europeanexpat said...

Can someone notify the Mecklenburg county tax officials? According to them my house value has grown 20% since 2007 (priced at the top of the bubble)

Anonymous said...

People keep acting like this is a "normal" cyclical downturn that's over in a year or so.

Can't they see it's much bigger than that.

More like what happened to Japan.

We're probably taking a serious notch down for a decade or more.

Too bad that a lot of our statistics like unemployment assume the cyclical pattern and don't account for long-term problems.

Anonymous said...

When Nobama gets booted outta the white house, then the economy will trun around. It's the Ded, not the party. If they don't like who is in there, they can make it hard to serve. See ya Nobama, don't let the door hit ya on the way out!!!

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