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Immobilienmarkt USA
Government home price index posts drop
WASHINGTON – May 23, 2008 – A home-price index
considered to be the most comprehensive reading of the U.S. market
posted the sharpest decline in its 17-year history, and analysts say
housing has yet to bottom out.
Rapidly falling home prices in California,
Florida and Nevada skewed the national results.
The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise
Oversight said Thursday that home prices fell 3.1 percent in the
first quarter compared with last year.
It was only the second quarter of price
declines since the index started in 1991. The price index first
declined on a year-over-year basis in the final quarter of 2007,
when it dropped 0.45 percent.
Another widely followed reading, the
Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller index, has shown larger declines for
major U.S. metropolitan areas. But analysts say the government index
provides a more comprehensive reading of nationwide housing market.
That’s particularly true for midwestern
states, where prices never skyrocketed and have been less affected
by the real estate downturn.
“Most people don’t live in a Miami condo,”
said Michael Englund, chief economist with Action Economics in
Boulder, Colo.
Still, declines in the government index,
which focuses on less expensive properties and includes fewer houses
bought with risky home loans that have gone sour over the past year,
show the depth of the housing market’s troubles.
Prices fell in 43 states, with California
and Nevada showing the biggest declines. Home prices dropped by more
than 8 percent in those states.
The government index also fell 1.7 percent
from the fourth quarter of 2007 to the first quarter of 2008, the
largest quarterly price drop on record.
“The large overhang of real estate
inventory awaiting sale continues to force price declines in many
areas, but particularly in places that had seen very sharp
appreciation,” Patrick Lawler, the agency’s chief economist, said in
a prepared statement.
The government index is calculated by
tracking mortgage loans of $417,000 or less that are bought or
backed by the government-sponsored mortgage-finance companies Fannie
Mae and Freddie Mac.
Wall Street analysts have tended to focus
on the S&P index, an update of which is due next Tuesday, as a way
to measure the value of securities backed by sub prime mortgages and
loans to borrowers in big metropolitan areas.
Earlier this month, economic forecasters
surveyed by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia projected the
government index would show a 5.4 percent annual decline in the
fourth quarter of 2008. The survey projected the reading would not
recover until early 2009.
Adam York, an economic analyst with
Wachovia Corp., said Thursday’s data was unsurprising. “It was
pretty widely expected that we would see declines this quarter and
for some time to come,” he said.
The housing market is facing numerous
troubles as buyers stay on the fence and rising mortgage defaults
dump more homes on an already glutted market. In addition, many
banks have raised their lending standards in response to the surge
in mortgage defaults.
Freddie Mac reported Thursday that 30-year
fixed-rate mortgages averaged 5.98 percent this week. That was down
from 6.01 percent last week and the lowest level in five weeks.
Source: ap.org
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