S&P confirms lower home prices

It is no secret that the housing market has been going through some rough times over the last year. And as we have moved more into a sellers' buyers' market, prices have been slowly but surely heading down. Today this fact was affirmed by the Standard & Poor's/Case Shiller national home price index which showed that home prices fell in the first quarter verses the same period last year.

According to today's report, the index indicated that the prices of existing homes sold during the first quarter fell 0.7% from the fourth quarter last year, and were down 1.4% year over year. Granted, there are still some areas in the country where prices are not on the decline, but according to S&P 13 out of the 20 top metropolitan areas that it covers saw falling home prices in the month of March. You can get the data on all 20 covered areas from the S&P site.

This news should really come as no surprise to our readers, we have been following home prices over the last couple months pretty closely, and last Friday we saw where the National Association of Realtors reported that home prices fell in April as well. With prices falling during April we have now seen nine straight months of falling home prices. For now it looks like we can continue to expect to see weakness in the housing market, and this year will more than likely prove to be the first year that home prices will drop since the NAR starting tracking prices way back in 1968.

Michael Fowlkes has worked as a stock trader for seven years and spent the last two years working as an analyst for the online investment advisory service Investor'sObserver.