banktime.com

For a little while there, it looked like the desperately struggling American housing market may have been experiencing some relief. Today, the closely watched Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller home price index showed home prices falling again, following a marginal and brief rise during the months of September and October. The index follows home prices in twenty major metro areas throughout the United States, including Boston, Charlotte, New York, and Seattle. Prices rose by a faint 0.3 percent in the last two months. It doesn’t seem like much, but it was enough to trigger hopes on the part of industry spectators who have been watching plummeting home prices with despair. Now, it seems like the faint flicker of hope being noticed was nothing but that – a flicker. Nine of the index cities have fallen during November.

According to Maureen Maitland, a representative with Standard & Poor’s, this time period may end up being one of transition for American housing. The Case-Shiller index has seen prices dropping for years now, with an all-time low occurring back in May. As of August, only a few of the cities profiled on the index were still showing a declining trend. Analysts were beginning to gradually express hope that just maybe the darkest days of the recession’s woes were behind us all. The news of the monthly drops has re-injected pessimism into the dialogue, just in time for the holiday season. Maitland pointed out that the housing market has historically declined during the coldest months of the year, and that this year an abundance of additional complications (ridiculously high inventory, a skyrocketing unemployment rate, ever-increasing foreclosures, and the altogether troubled economy) are playing their respective roles to keep things difficult. Things may stay bleak until the spring at this point, she speculated.