Home prices down 14% over past year

Atlanta home prices continued to join in the national slide, falling 14.3 percent on average during the past year, according to a closely followed survey released Tuesday.

Area home prices are not dropping as fast as those in cities that saw supercharged run-ups during the housing bubble, but Atlanta prices are, on average, back to the levels of May 2001, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index.

Homes in the nation’s 20 largest metro areas lost an average of 19 percent in the past year, according to the index. Prices fell in all the metro areas and in nine of them they fell more than 20 percent during the past year, said David Blitzer, chairman of the Standard & Poor’s committee responsible for the data.

“There are very few bright spots that one can see in the data,” he said.

Some are especially bleak: Phoenix, Las Vegas, San Francisco and Miami all lost roughly one-third of their value during the past year and are down more than 40 percent since their peak.

Atlanta never had the stratospheric surge of those cities, thanks largely to a building boom that at its most frenetic was adding almost 60,000 homes a year.

Prices have fallen about 20 percent since peaking in the summer of 2007, according to the survey.

Even so, there are pockets of growth —- at least in the past few months. East Cobb and parts of Decatur, for example, have seen price increases, said Marietta-based realtor Tal Kramer of Re/Max Communities.

 Associated Press
HOME PRICES FALL 
The S&P/Case-Shiller home 20-city housing index dropped by 19 percent from January 2008. 
Composite 20-city index 
Graph tracks prices from Jan. 2008 through Jan. 2009. 
Jan. 2008: over 180
Jan. 2009: 146.40 
Jan. 2000=100 
Source: Standard & Poor's