Housing Takes Another Awful Beating

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Mar 30, 2:29PM EDT · Published Feb 24, 9:21AM EST

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Housing prices continue to cascade.

According to the new S&P Case-Shiller Home Price Index, home prices dropped nearly 19% in the fourth quarter, a record.

In the ten largest cities in the US, the decline topped 19%.

Since home prices peaked in Q2 2006, they have plunged 26%.

The data raise the question of whether the new mortgage assistance package being proposed by the Administration can stop falling real estate prices or whether that money would come into the market “behind the curve” of price contraction. The inventory of homes on the market may be so large that supporting people who want to stay in their homes would have very little effect on the much larger market of “for sale” and abandoned home.

Certainly, the task of putting a floor under the housing prices is getting much, much harder.

Douglas A. McIntrye

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.