Local Home Prices Fall Steeply Since 2006

The news on Tuesday about a steep fall in home prices is no surprise to many Philadelphia residents, who have seen home prices fall sharply in the past year.

The Standard & Poor’s Case-Shiller Home Price Index for 20 large cities fell 0.8 percent from February, the eighth drop in a row. Prices are now down 33.1 percent nationally from the July 2006 peak.

While that news rattled investors and anyone who owns or has a mortgage on a house, people in Philadelphia were spared a big deflation, until the past year.

Philadelphia is not in the Standard & Poor's Index, but another widely followed index from Zillow, an online service that tracks more than 100 million U.S. homes

Since March 2006, the Zillow Housing Value Index shows prices locally have dropped about 18 percent over the past five years, from $231,000 to $187,600, for the greater Philadelphia region. (Nationally, Zillow says home prices fell 29 percent since March 2006.)

So in big-picture terms, people in our area are better off than the national average, but still losing money on houses.

But in the past year, housing prices fell almost 11 percent in the Philadelphia area, showing that the crisis hitting the rest of the country is hitting home here. (The national average was an 8 percent loss in the past year.)

Zillow's database tracks home prices down to the town and neighborhood level, and several parts of the greater Philadelphia metro area took a big loss in the past year.

Click: Get Your Local Town's Housing Prices

For example, housing prices fell about 35 percent - just in the past year - in Salem, N.J., while areas such as Chester, Pittsgrove and Camden saw decreases of more than 20 percent in the past year.

Of the 198 towns and neighborhood here tracked by Zillow, only one (Pilesgrove, N.J.) showed a home-price gain in the past year.

And in the past five years, only two towns - Wilmington and Darby Township - have seen a rise in housing prices.

Areas hit hardest since 2006 include Blackwood and Southampton (which have seen a 35 percent drop in sales prices), North Hanover, Burlington Township and Edgewater Park (which all saw 30 percent housing price drops).
 

By The Numbers is a regular MyFoxPhilly feature that looks at key Philadelphia issues behind publicly available numbers and research.
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