Metro Atlanta home prices fell to the lowest point since 1998 as a mass of foreclosures and short sales continued to batter the market, new data released Tuesday showed.
Home prices in Atlanta fell for the fourth straight month in November, with a 2.5 percent decline that followed a 5 percent drop in October, according to the widely watched Standard & Poor’s Case-Shiller Home Price Indices.
“Atlanta continues to stand out in terms of recent relative weakness,” said David Blitzer, chairman of the index committee at S&P Indices.
Nationwide, 19 of 20 cities covered by the indices saw home prices fall for the second month in a row. Case-Shiller set a baseline home price index of 100 in 2000, so an index of 125 would reflect an increase of 25 percent. Atlanta’s index fell to 88.93 in November. Its peak was 136.47 in mid-2007.
Since then metro Atlanta’s index has drifted steadily down despite mild rebounds during summer months.
Metro Atlanta’s index for November was the second-lowest among the 20 cities, with only Detroit faring worse at 70.66. Washington D.C. had the highest index at 184.75, meaning prices there were still nearly 85 percent higher than in 2000.
Foreclosures have played a significant role in bringing down Atlanta home prices, said Maureen Maitland, vice president of S&P Indices.
In December, the average metro Atlanta home sales price was nearly $178,000, down roughly 12 percent from December 2010, according to the Atlanta Board of Realtors.
Some metro regions such as Phoenix, which suffered from overbuilding, may be seeing a slight improvement but only because they have hit bottom, Maitland said. Phoenix’s Case-Shiller index rose about a half-point to 101.12 in November.
“They’re not out of the woods,” she said.
In 2011, foreclosures and short sales -- when a property is sold for less than is owed on it -- made up roughly 60 percent of all sales in Atlanta, which will continue to see similar numbers this year, according to Prudential Georgia Realty.
Still, “We see very different results in many areas of metro Atlanta where short sales and foreclosures have slowed dramatically,” said Dan Forsman, president and CEO of the real estate firm.
“The inventory is getting very low, which is good news for sellers.”
Nationally, there are no signs the market is headed in a positive direction, Maitland said. The economy is turning around slowly but unemployment remains high; meanwhile, the national gross domestic product has grown only slightly, she said.
“No one is able to confidently predict where the housing market is going to go in 2012,” she said. “There’s just too much noise in the data.”
