What’s Your Home Worth Today? Probably What it Was in 2003 — Dallas Real Estate News

Your home value could be 4.3 % lower today than it was last year if you follow the guys over at Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller, which released their Home Price Index this week. That means home prices have been falling for an entire year in the 20 major U.S. cities that create this way over-quoted housing market indicator. Case-Shiller tracks only previously owned home sales, not new construction. Of course, new construction across the U.S. is the lowest it’s been in 50 years.

No one metropolis was spared: all the 20 major U.S. markets in Case-Shiller’s survey for June saw home-price declines from mid-2010, even Washington D.C.

Nationwide, home prices shot down 4.5 percent from June 2010.

But Dallas was singled out, along with Denver, the major Cali cities, and D.C. as having bottomed in 2009 and kept their (our) heads above the water.

“Relatively strong markets,” Standard & Poor’s David Blitzer said in the report.

Prices in most markets — including Dallas’ 1.4 percent blip — were up in June from May, to expected in the buying season.

Steve Brown says that if you count 2007 as the peak year of pricing, Dallas-area home prices are down about 9% from that Rocky Mountain High.

My favorite economist at the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University, Dr. James Gaines, says what we all know: the short sales and foreclosures dragged pricing down and will continue to do so until we clear them out in 12 to 18 months.

The good news there: Dallas foreclosure rates are diminishing.

The cities that took the biggest hits were (ouch) Minneapolis (10.8 percent), Portland, Ore. (9.6 percent) and Phoenix (9.3 percent).

The smallest price drops happeend in, no surprise, government-employee rich Washington, D.C. (1.2 percent) and Boston (2.1 percent). Watch for those market to go up first.

But it’s all local. Ted Wilson of Residential Strategies says the foreclosures depend on what part of town you live in. In affluent neighborhoods with few distressed sales, such as the Park Cities or Preston Hollow, prices recently have been flat or are actually higher. Many gargantuan homes that have languished for years have sold.

But good news: the number of foreclosures has dropped in the northern burbs, and price declines are softening. For the first time in eleven years, year-to-date residential postings declined. Here are the facts from Roddy’s Foreclosure Listing Service Inc:

• “D/FW quarterly residential foreclosure posting activity has dropped to its lowest level in eleven quarters.”
• “With just 12,876 foreclosure postings on D/FW homes in the third quarter of this year, quarterly postings fell below 13,500 for the second quarter consecutive quarter.”
• “Over the last year, third quarter home postings plunged downward 21%.  
•  “On a quarter-to-quarter comparison, third quarter’s posting level was down 3% from the 13,310 notices filed for the second quarter of this year.”
• “All four counties within the D/FW Metroplex had a decline in third quarter’s posting activity compared to one year earlier; and, in all four counties, quarterly postings dropped to their lowest level in two years or more.”
• “Among the four counties, the deepest decline was a 25% fall in homes posted for foreclosure in Dallas County, which most often ranks with the highest volume of home postings among the four counties in the Metro.”