FHFA reports House prices drop 0.5% during August and a huge downward revision for July

WASHINGTON, DC – U.S. house prices fell 0.5 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis from June to July, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s (FHFA) monthly House Price Index. The previously reported 0.3 percent decline in June was revised to a 1.2 percent decline. The unusually large revision mainly reflects the addition of new data from late June that show considerably weaker prices than earlier in the month. For the 12 months ending in July, U.S. prices fell 3.3 percent. The U.S. index is 13.8 percent below its April 2007 peak.

The FHFA monthly index is calculated using purchase prices of houses backing mortgages that have been sold to or guaranteed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. For the nine Census Divisions, seasonally adjusted monthly price changes from June to July ranged from -1.6 percent in the South Atlantic Division to +1.1 percent in the Pacific Division.

The regulator's index is calculated by using purchase prices of houses financed with mortgages sold to or guaranteed by mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac.

Sept. 22 (Bloomberg)

U.S. home prices dropped 3.3 percent in July from a year earlier, the eighth consecutive decline, as foreclosed properties flooded the market.

Prices fell 0.5 percent from June, the Federal Housing Finance Agency in Washington said in a report today. Economists had projected a 0.2 percent decline from the previous month, based on the average of 15 estimates in a Bloomberg survey.

Foreclosures are boosting the supply of available properties and reducing prices, even as mortgage rates tumble to record lows. The time it would take to clear the market of homes for sale was 12.5 months in July, the highest in more than a decade of data, according to the National Association of Realtors. Banks seized a record 95,364 properties from delinquent borrowers in August, according to RealtyTrac Inc., an Irvine, California-based seller of housing data.

“We have a lot of homes for sale, and a lot of them are distressed properties,” said Thomas Lawler, founder and president of Lawler Housing and Economic Consulting in Leesburg, Virginia. “That is putting downward pressure on home prices.”

Sales of existing homes in July plunged 27 percent to a 3.83 million annual pace, the lowest level on record, NAR said Aug. 24. July sales of new homes dropped to an annual pace of 276,000, the fewest since data began in 1963, the Commerce Department reported Aug. 25.