Home prices drop in major US cities

Overall, the gauge was just shy of the six-year low reached in April 2009, two months before end of the recession.

The Case-Shiller measure is based on a three-month average, so December and January transactions are figured into the overall February number. 

Prices in 10 markets — Atlanta; Charlotte, N.C.; Chicago; Las Vegas; Miami; New York; Phoenix; Portland, Ore.; Seattle; and Tampa, Fla. — all dipped to their lowest levels since 2006 or 2007, when the housing boom was ending.

The year-over-year decline in 19 of 20 cities was led by an 8.4 percent decline in Phoenix and an 8.3 percent decrease in Minneapolis. Washington, D.C., was the exception, with values moving up 2.7 percent. 

Prices are expected to bottom out this spring, though a backlog of foreclosures caused by investigations into problems with repossession paperwork could stretch out the period of falling property values.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Tuesday that “housing and construction are still very weak, and it’s going to take years still to repair the damage caused to the housing market.”

“We’re just at the beginning of trying to figure out how to fix that mess,” Geithner said in remarks at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. “You have to put in place a housing-finance system that will allow private capital to carry the dominant role of financing and mortgage for people.” 

The rising number of foreclosures, protracted high unemployment, large housing inventories, tight credit and concerns that prices still haven’t hit rock bottom are slowing the sector’s recovery. 

Still, 69 percent of those asked in a recent poll see housing as a buyer’s market, essentially unchanged since 2009, according to a recent Gallup poll.