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Homes See First Price Drop On Record
By Dan Handle, 24 Jan 11:07
The median price for a homes dropped 1.3 percent to $219,000 in 2007, while total home sales plunged by 13 percent for the year.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Prices of homes sold in December registered the biggest year-over-year decline on record, according to an industry trade group, and 2007 is the first year on record that has seen a drop. A report issued Thursday showed the problems in the housing market have not yet bottomed out.
The National Association of Realtors (NAR) said the median price of homes sold in December fell nearly 6 percent from a year earlier to $208,400. The three biggest declines in prices ever recorded have now come in the last four months.
In addition to the December price decline, NAR reported the median price for all homes sold in 2007 fell 1.3 percent to $218,900, the first time that the annual price reading has shown a decline since the group started tracking that measure in 1968.
"What we saw in December was a rough month to cap off a rough year," said Mike Larson, real estate analyst with Weiss Research. "There wasn't much holiday cheer."
The news comes one day after Merrill Lynch released a study that forecasted a 15 percent decline in home sale prices for 2008.
Though NAR's chief economist Lawrence Yun called Merrill's figures "way too pessimistic," NAR estimates that home prices for the current quarter will see a 5.3 perc
Tags: home price news