Econintersect: Lender Processing Services (LPS), said national average home price for transactions during November 2011 was $199,000 – a decline of 0.6% month-over-month, 2.7% year-to-date, and now home prices are reaching a price level not seen since October 2002 . This is the sixth consecutive month of decreases in prices. LPS, based on partial data, believes December 2011 data will show a deeper 0.8% decline in home prices.
“Since the post-bubble drop in home prices eased in January of 2009, we’ve generally seen that prices for homes in the lowest 20 percent of local markets in the metropolitan areas covered by the LPS HPI now differ by more than the highest 20 percent from their levels 10 years ago,” said Kyle Lundstedt, managing director of LPS Applied Analytics. “In those metropolitan areas where lowest-priced homes have increased in value, the differences between the high and low ends of the market have usually shrunk; where they have decreased in value, the differences have grown.”
LPS noted that:
Price changes were largely consistent across the country during November, increasing in 13 percent of the ZIP codes in the LPS HPI (Figure 2). Higher-priced homes had somewhat smaller declines: 0.55 percent for the top 20 percent of homes (prices above $311,000), compared to 0.60 percent for the bottom 20 percent (below $100,000). The highest-priced homes, the top 1 percent (prices above $839,000), declined 0.47 percent.
…… Twenty of the MSAs with average price increases were in Florida, with the remainder in Arizona, Tennessee and New York. Phoenix was the best-performing MSA, as it was in October, with an increase during November of 1.1 percent. The other four of the top five MSAs with increases (greater than 0.6 percent) were in Fort Lauderdale, Miami and Orlando, Fla. and in Lake Havasu City-Kingman, Ariz.
source: LPS
