US home sale prices drop 14% in quarter

The median price fell 14 percent from a year earlier, reaching $169,000, the National Association of Realtors said yesterday. Prices dropped in 134 of 152 metropolitan areas, with some of the deepest declines in Cape Coral and Fort Myers, Fla., and San Francisco and San Jose, Calif.

"There are a lot of forces pushing the market in different directions," said Brian Bethune, economist at IHS Global Insight in Lexington. "We've seen huge improvements in affordability, not only in prices but also in terms of mortgage rates below 5 percent, but what's pushing down those prices is foreclosures and job losses."

Sales of previously owned homes fell 6.8 percent from a year earlier to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.59 million units, the realtors group said. From the fourth quarter, sales were down 3.2 percent. The figures include single-family homes, condominiums, and co-ops.

"We are very much in a bifurcated market with sharp differences between foreclosures and short sales on one hand, and traditional homes on the other," Lawrence Yun, the group's chief economist, said.

Some areas showed "dramatic" drops in home prices, Yun said. "In areas with the biggest price declines, we also see much higher levels of distressed sales which are distorting the data," he said.

The steepest price decline was in Cape Coral-Fort Myers, down 59 percent from a year ago, followed by Saginaw, Mich., with a 54 percent drop. The next biggest were Akron, Ohio, with a 48 percent decline; San Francisco, down 43 percent; and San Jose, Calif., with a 42 percent drop.

The largest sales gain from a year ago was in Nevada, up 117 percent; followed by California which rose 81 percent; Arizona up 50 percent; and Florida with a 25 percent increase.

Those four states accounted for the 26 highest foreclosure rates in the first quarter among US cities with a population of 200,000 or more, according to RealtyTrac Inc., which sells real estate data.

While the quarterly drop in prices set a record, the declines slowed in each of the three months. The US median home price dropped 12 percent in March compared with a year earlier, according to the realtors group. That was slower than the 14 percent decline in February and the 18 percent slide in January.