Atlanta Home Prices Continue to Decline

The S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices was just published for the month of January 2009.   On the chart you can see the precipitous decline over the past few months - particularly going back to Sept 2008.  The decline is so steep that we can only hope that this is a precursor to a market bottom.    What we can see from the chart is that we are now back to price levels not seen since June of 2001 in the Atlanta market.

One important note to make is that there is no sharp increase in home prices in the 2001 to 2007 time frame as we saw in markets such as Florida and California.  One could infer from this that much of the punishment we have taken over the past couple of years has a lot more to do with the overall perception of the housing market than a bubble in the Atlanta market.  Hopefully, when the foreclosure situation corrects itself, we will recapture many of the losses sustained.

Overall we are down right at 20% from the peak in July of 2007.