09/23/2015
One if four U.S. homes have lost value in the past year, with markets in the northeast such as Washington, D.C., Baltimore and Philadelphia slammed especially hard with price declines of more than 40 percent.
It wasn't much better in metro areas in the Midwest, with Pittsburgh, Chicago, Cincinnati and Cleveland all seeing declines topping 30 percent.
The less-than-upbeat take on the housing market comes from Zillow, a provider of real-estate information.
"It's easy to say the recession is over when a third of the biggest markets are more expensive now than ever before, but we're still seeing a number of homes losing value," Svenja Gudell, Zillow's chief economist, said in a statement. "The reality is there are still areas lagging behind in the recovery."
Cities including Dallas, San Francisco and Denver tallied double-digit increases last year and single-digit percentage price declines this year.
"The speed of recovery in the housing market might not be as fast as we had predicted," Andres Carbacho-Burgos, a senior economist at Moody's, told CBS MoneyWatch. More households are opting to rent, the economist added.
Perhaps not surprising, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) has a vastly different take. The trade group contends Zillow's methodology is flawed, and that is research shows home prices climbed in 93 percent of the nation's metro areas over the past year.
John Petrack, executive vice president of the Realtors Association of Metropolitan Pittsburgh, disputes Zillow's estimate that home values in his area fell 37.1 percent.
"Even during the Great Recession our home values increased modestly," Petrack said. "In fact, members say this is probably one of the busiest summers than they can recall."
But supply and demand are not exactly running in concert with would-be home owners, Zillow's Gudell said.
A lot of buyers are looking for urban high density living with a lot of amenities close by and we have a lot of homes but not necessarily in the center of the city and readily available."
