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Home Prices Climb for First Time in Eight Months

The ""Case-Shiller Home Price Indexes"":http://www.standardandpoors.com/indices/sp-case-shiller-home-price-indices/en/us/?indexId=spusa-cashpidff--p-us rose for the first time in eight months in April. The 10- and 20-city indexes each rose 1.3 percent to the highest levels this year.

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Year-over-year, the 10-city index was down 2.2 percent and the 20-city index off 1.9 percent, both improvements from March.

Economists had expected the 20-city index to show a 2.3 percent year-over-year decline in April.

Prices improved month-over-month in all but one of the 20 cities tracked by Case-Shiller; prices fell 3.6 percent in Detroit. Prices were up year-over-year in 10 of the 20 cities.

According to the ""National Association of Realtors"":http://www.realtor.org/, the median price of an single family home rose 5.4 percent in April, while

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the government report from the ""Census Bureau"":http://www.census.gov/ and ""HUD"":http://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD showed the median price of a new home fell 1.5 percent in that month.

Year-over-year, the median price of an existing single-family home went up 7.8 percent in April, according to NAR. The Census Bureau and HUD meanwhile found that the median price of a new home rose 5.0 percent.

Month-over-month price improvements in cities listed by the Case-Shiller index were led by a 3.4 percent jump in San Francisco, followed by Washington, D.C. (2.8 percent), Phoenix (2.5 percent), Atlanta and Cleveland (2.3 percent each) and Portland and Seattle (2.0 percent each).

The price improvement in Washington came despite a 0.7 percentage point jump in that city's unemployment rate to 9.0 percent in April. The unemployment rate fell in each of the other cities showing a price improvement, according to date from the Labor Department.

The year-over-year price gains were led by Phoenix (8.6 percent), Minneapolis (3.8 percent), Miami (3.2 percent), and Denver and Dallas (2.8 percent).

Atlanta has the steepest year-over-year price decline (17.0 percent), followed by Las Vegas (5.8 percent), Chicago (5.6 percent), New York (3.8 percent) and Los Angeles (3.6 percent).

Even with the improvement in April, the 10-city price index is down 49.3 percent from its June 2006 peak. The 20-city index is down 49.1 percent from its July 2006 high point.

About Author: Mark Lieberman

Mark Lieberman is the former Senior Economist at Fox Business Network. He is now Managing Director and Senior Economist at Economics Analytics Research. He can be heard each Friday on The Morning Briefing on POTUS on Sirius-XM Radio 124.
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