Before Slowing, Home Prices Slid 0.9% in January: LPS

Home prices slid 0.9 percent in January before likely slowing to a crawl in February, analytics provider ""Lender Processing Services"":http://www.lpsvcs.com/Pages/default.aspx (LPS) said Monday.

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The company released a Home Price Index that showed home prices averaging $195,000, signaling a seventh straight month of price declines.

Of nearly 600 metro areas, 524 encountered price declines, with a dip in prices for 39 states.

Pittsburgh emerged from the largest 26 metro areas as the only city to experience increases in average home prices since January 2005.

""With proper accounting for short sales, we see two things. First, prices on normal (nondistressed) properties are doing a bit better than had been estimated before. The dramatic fall in prices after the bubble is actually closer to 26 percent, less than the 30 percent which we and others have previously reported,"" Raj Dosaj, VP of LPS Applied Analytics, said in a statement.

""This is due to the fact that many of the short sales appear to be the same homes that saw significant increases in values during the bubble,"" he added.