A home-price index that tracks 20 metropolitan areas showed record annual declines in August, with prices down 16.6 percent from a year ago.
Every city tracked by the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller 20-city Composite Home Price Index saw annual price declines in August, and 13 saw those declines worsen from July. That helped push the index past the previous record 16.3 percent decline in July.
Phoenix and Las Vegas both saw annual declines exceeding 30 percent, while prices fell more than 25 percent in Miami, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego, Standard & Poor’s said.
Among the cities tracked in the index, Dallas and Charlotte saw the smallest annual price declines, with Dallas down 2.7 percent from a year ago and Charlotte down 2.8 percent.
Comparing August to July, two markets — Cleveland and Boston — saw home prices appreciate. Boston, which registered 0.1 percent appreciation in August, has been in positive territory for five consecutive months, but prices have slipped 4.7 percent from a year ago. Dallas and Denver’s streaks of more than four consecutive months of price appreciation ended in August.
San Francisco saw the biggest month-to-month decline — 3.5 percent — compared with 1.8 percent depreciation in July.
Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller also publishes a 10-city Composite Home Price Index that tracks a subset of the metro areas in the 20-city index, which showed a 17.7 percent annual decline in August.
Because the 20-city and 10-city indexes include areas hardest hit by the housing downturn — including San Diego, Miami, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Detroit — they may show more extreme ups and downs in price than other national indexes.
A third Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller index, the U.S. National Home Price Index, covers all nine U.S. census divisions. The national index, which is released quarterly, was last published on Aug. 26, and showed a 15.4 percent decline in national home prices during the second quarter.
A national home-price index published last week by First American CoreLogic showed home prices falling 11.3 percent from a year ago in August (see story).
Another index that tracks homes bought using mortgages purchased or guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac showed annual price declines of 5.9 percent in August.
That index, which is published by the Federal Housing Finance Agency, may understate home-price appreciation and declines because it excludes mortgages too large or too risky for Fannie and Freddie.
But the index is considered useful for analyzing trends, and showed the annual decline in national home prices slowed from 0.8 percent in July to 0.6 percent in August (see story).
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