Zillow Releases Fourth Quarter Market Housing Report

• February 4th 2009

by Mark Wellborn

✉️ Want to forward this article? Click here.

Real estate valuation website Zillow has released its market report for the fourth quarter of last year and, predictably, things could be looking better. The report follows market trends like homes selling for a loss, negative equity and foreclosure transactions. Here are some overall highlights from the 161 metropolitan areas that the report tracks:

• U.S. home values continued to slide for the eighth consecutive quarter, declining 11.6 percent from a year ago, and falling 17.5 percent since the peak of the market in 2006.

• One in five homes sold in the past year was a foreclosure, and one in six of current homeowners have negative equity.

The DC Metro area statistics are not quite as bleak as the report indicates, but they are certainly not good. The graph below shows that if you bought a home in 2005 for $375,000, today that home has lost about 9 percent of its value.

The more dramatic graph is the one below which shows the percentage of homes in the DC Metro area that sold for a loss or went into foreclosure in the past two years. Both categories crept along below 10 percent from 2000 to 2007 before the lines shot northward in the last two years.

For the full report, click here.

This article originally published at http://dc.urbanturf.production.logicbrush.com/articles/blog/zillow_releases_fourth_quarter_market_housing_report/516.