Price In Housing Index Expected To Drop Even More

[caption id="attachment_1145" align="alignleft" width="400" caption="Housing Index At An All Time Low"][/caption]

Be sure to check out this intriguing article discussing the decline of prices in the housing index, written by David Streitfeld of the New York Times Business Day.

SAN FRANCISCO — The desire to own your own home, long a bedrock of the American Dream, is fast becoming a casualty of the worst housing downturn since the Great Depression.

Even as the economy began to fitfully recover in the last year, the percentage of homeowners dropped sharply, to 66.4 percent, from a peak of 69.2 percent in 2004. The ownership rate is now back to the level of 1998, and some housing experts say it could decline to the level of the 1980s or even earlier.

Disenchantment with real estate is bound to swell further on Tuesday when the most widely watched housing index is all but guaranteed to show that prices of existing homes sank in March below the lows reached two years ago — until now the bottom of the housing crash. In February, the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller index of 20 large cities slumped for the seventh month in a row.

Read more at New York Times Business Day