Metro Atlanta home prices flattened in September after rising slightly in the three previous months, according to a widely watched national index.
But the area's year-over-year drop in prices narrowed, continuing a trend.
The Standard & Poor's Case-Shiller Index, released Tuesday, showed seasonally adjusted metro Atlanta prices virtually unchanged from August, ending a string of upticks since June.
Prices were down 9 percent from September a year earlier, compared with an almost 11 percent year-over-year decline in August and a 14 percent gap in June.
“It is still negative though, and that is bad,” said Steve Palm, president of Marietta-based real estate data firm Smart Numbers. “We’re just working up negatives right now and what we need is some really big positives to turn things around.”
In November 2008 and January of this year Atlanta saw the largest price drops in recent history, he said. So, while any improvement looks good on paper, it won’t really do anything for the market until there are “some big double-digit price increases,” Palm said.
Nationally, the 10- and 20-city indexes posted consecutive month-over-month increases for the fifth month in a row. Cleveland was the only city that showed a decline from August, according to a news release with the index.
The Case Shiller index does not peg actual prices but tracks changes in the residential real estate values through a repeat sales pricing technique.
The technique involves compiling data on “properties that have sold at least twice, in order to capture the true appreciated value of each specific sales unit,” according to a methodology report.
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