Las Vegas And Phoenix Battle For Real Estate Infamy

So which city was hit harder by the real estate collapse, Las Vegas or Phoenix? To be sure they both have taken serious hits, but only one will go down as the winner. Tim Iacono from The Mess That Greenspan Made looks at the latest reports and gives the latest update on the markets. If your city is not in the top spot, don't fret because there is still lots of time to play catch up.

The September report(.pdf) for the S&P Case-Shiller Home Price Indices shows the 10-City and 20-City Composite Home Price Indices at new record annual declines of 18.6 percent and 17.4 percent, respectively. Price indices for all 20 cities are shown below.
To aid in viewing this graphic, the order of the legend (upper left) reflects the top-to-bottom position of all 20 cities for the current month (far right). As such, the legend order indicates which cities have managed to hold onto the largest real estate price gains since 2000.

Congratulations New York!

You've just surpassed Washington D.C. as the metro area that has held onto home price gains the best in this decade. The bad news is that, with all the recent troubles on Wall Street, this may not last that long.

Not surprisingly, Phoenix and Las Vegas continue to lead the way down, year-over-year home price declines in both areas pushing past 31 percent in September as indicated in red in the table below - the death match continues.

A few other areas are also threatening to crack the 30+ percent annual decline threshold as indicated in blue, notably, San Francisco, an area where the annual price decline worsened to 29.5 percent.
Two areas showed month-to-month improvement - Cleveland and Boston - while home prices in Dallas were unchanged from August. Cleveland was the only region where the annual home price decline improved from a year ago, from -6.6 percent in August to -6.4 percent in September.

David M. Blitzer, Chairman of the Index Committee at Standard & Poor's, noted:

The turmoil in the financial markets is placing further downward pressure on a housing market already weakened by its own fundamentals.

All three aggregate indices and 13 of the 20 metro areas are reporting new record rates of decline. Looking at the returns of the U.S. National Index, prices are back to where they were in early 2004. As of September 2008, the 10-City Composite is down 23.4% from its peak, the 20-City Composite is down 21.8% and the National Composite is down 21.0%

You'd think that things couldn't get any worse for home prices, but they probably will.

This article has been reposted from The Mess That Greenspan Made. The full post can also be viewed on The Mess That Greenspan Made.