Real Estate

Pricing for homes gone down drastically since May all around the nation. According to the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller 20-city index it has dropped by 15.8% in May a year ago -which is a record decline since it began in 2000. The 10-city index plunged 16.9 percent, its biggest decline in its 21-year history.

No city in the Case-Shiller 20-city index saw price gains in May, the second straight month that’s happened. The monthly indices have not recorded an overall home price increase in any month since August 2006.
Home values have fallen 18.4 percent since the 20-city index’s peak in July 2006.

The construction of single family home fell in the month of June to the slowest pace that the market has seen in 17 years. The only thing that helped to give them a reprieve was a change in certain New York laws - which helped to increase apartment building.

The Commerce Department reported Thursday that construction of single-family homes dropped by 5.3 percent in June to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 647,000 units, the weakest performance since January 1991, another period when the housing industry was going through a severe downturn.