Housing Down For The Count?

From RealtyTimes:

Housing Market On The Ropes

A flurry of economic reports unleashed in August left the national housing market reeling and on the ropes as it headed into the final round of what is typically the heavy buying season.

With each month like another grueling round for a pugilist in dire need of a cut doctor, the housing market is sweating prices and bleeding sales as it faces the grim possibility of going down for the count.

Yet, even with the wind all but knocked out of the housing bubble and hopes for a comeback slim, some experts hesitated calling the fight after more than a month of mortgage interest rate declines put some punch back into buying power.
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The Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller Home Price Index of 10 major metropolitan areas reported in August that single-family home prices revealed zero appreciation from May to June, after only a 0.5 percent gain from April to May as the market braced for price depreciation.
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"Home prices are clearly decelerating," said Yale University economist Robert Shiller, the chief economist at MacroMarkets LLC, who has warned of a house price bubble going bust. Shiller predicted the tech-sector driven stock market bust more than half a decade ago and co-developed the index with S&P.
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Six of the 10 metro areas showed a month-over-month decline from May to June, with Boston reporting the largest monthly loss and an annual price loss of almost 2 percent, the index revealed.
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John Burns Real Estate Consulting reported 84 of 100 of the nation's largest housing markets are overpriced with only 13 markets below historical median affordability levels and three at their historical affordability level.

Burns said in nine markets, prices are so high the markets were worse off in August in terms of affordability than in the early 1980s when interest rates were 18 percent or more. They were New York; Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles; Seattle; Portland; Baltimore; Edison; , Nassau; and Naples.