US home prices drop at sharpest rate in 20 years

[Amerigo Vespucci]

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080527/ap_on_bi_ge/home_prices

NEW YORK - U.S. home prices dropped at the sharpest rate in two decades during the first quarter, a closely watched index showed Tuesday, a somber indication that the housing slump continues to deepen.

Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller said its national home price index fell 14.1 percent in the first quarter compared with a year earlier, the lowest since its inception in 1988. The quarterly index covers all nine U.S. Census divisions.

The narrower indices also set record declines. The 20-city index tumbled 14.4 percent during the quarter, the lowest since that index was started in 2001. The 10-city index plunged 15.3 percent, a record in its 20-year history.

"There are very few silver linings that one can see in the data. Most of the nation appears to remain on a downward path," said David Blitzer, chairman of S&P's index committee.

Read more: Yahoo News

[asthmaticeog]

1. I don't consider this a "slump." I consider it a correction. nt

[Ferd Berfle]

3. Consider it anything you want - but have a look at this

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=3345442&mesg_id=3345442

[spinbaby]

4. Las Vegas is down 25.9%

With that kind of a decline, no one who's bought a house in the last few years has any equity in their homes.

[asthmaticeog]

5. I'm not saying people *aren't* getting fucked sideways, they totally are.

But prices were based, for over a decade, not on the intrinsic worth of real estate in a given area or the size and quality of a given home, but on the availability of loans. Speculators and mortgage brokers artificially inflated the prices of homes and real estate agents profited obscenely from these artificially inflated housing prices. And now the market is correcting itself. It was bubbled for so long and so egregiously that the correction is destroying the economy, but it's still a correction - homes are now selling for prices that are much more in line with their actual worth. Yours is not an argument that this isn't a correction, it's THE argument for why these fucking vampires should have been regulated all along. Hell, I *live* in the belly of the bubble. Northern Ohio was hit by predatory lending first and hardest, and my neighborhood got trendy as fuck based on bank speculation, KeyBank in particular, may they be infested with tapeworms and ticks. It used to be you couldn't even rent an apartment around here without knowing the person moving out. Now the for sale signs on the new townhouses that look like they were built out of injection molded Necco Wafers are as ubiquitous as as the yuppie cars parked in front of them. It's completely fucked. It's still a correction.

[Ferd Berfle]

2. deleted