The downturn of the nation's housing market accelerated in the third quarter as home prices fell 16.6% in the three months that ended in September from the same period a year earlier.
But the drop varied greatly from region to region, with the Western U.S. hit hardest.
The latest Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller U.S. national index of home prices, released Tuesday, showed the Los Angeles area posting some of the steepest price declines in the nation, behind only the Phoenix, Las Vegas, San Francisco and Miami metropolitan areas.
Those cities have seen price declines of roughly 30% since last year, about 10 times the annual rate of decline in the Charlotte, N.C., and Dallas areas.
"There's been a real shift in the past few months," said David M. Blitzer, chairman of the index committee at Standard & Poor's, with prices in California, Nevada, Arizona and Florida cities tumbling while other regions decline gradually.
Blitzer said metro areas in much of the nation could be called "not disaster cases." There "you're seeing declines of 10%, 12%, not 25% or more," he said.
In some areas, prices simply did not soar as high during the boom years. Charlotte home prices rose 35% from 2000 to their 2007 peak, according to the index. In Los Angeles, the home price climbed 174% from 2000 to its peak in 2006, the index shows.
Not surprisingly, "the biggest falls have been in the biggest bubble areas," said Dean Baker, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C.
Home prices are generally localized, but declining prices in one area can affect another in some cases. For instance, if retirees or others planning to move from a higher-priced region to a lower-priced area are hit by falling prices in their home area, they will have less to spend on the home they would buy in the new area.
Baker said such regional interplay could be adding to price declines in Las Vegas and Phoenix, which have been popular destinations for relocating Californians.
Home prices for the Case-Shiller U.S. national index, which covers the entire nation and is compiled quarterly, dropped to 2004 levels. The national index is down 21% from its 2006 peak
Phoenix posted the largest year-to-year decline, 31.9%, followed by Las Vegas, with a 31.3% drop, and San Francisco, which saw prices fall 29.5% from the same quarter a year earlier.
