It’s a great time to buy a home in the Youngstown-Warren area

STAFF/WIRE REPORT

Home prices have fallen nearly everywhere, but it’s still tough to find a better price than in the Mahoning Valley.

The median sale price of existing homes in the Youngstown-Warren metropolitan area was the second-lowest in the nation in the fourth quarter of last year.

The local figure of $61,700 was undercut only by Saginaw, Mich., which came in at $43,900. The median price is the value in the middle of all housing prices.

Prices fell in the Mahoning Valley, just as they did in nearly nine out of 10 U.S. metropolitan areas, the National Association of Realtors said Thursday. The drops came as low-cost foreclosures flooded the market and the housing market’s decline spread nationwide, the Realtors said.

The local median price fell $10,000, or 15 percent, from the fourth quarter of 2007.

The National Association of Realtors said Thursday that median sales prices of existing homes declined in 134 out of 153 metropolitan areas compared with the same period in 2007. Sales fell in all but six states.

Nationwide, the median sales price was $180,100, down 12 percent from a year ago. But price declines of 30 percent or more were found in much of California, plus parts of Michigan, Florida, Arizona and Nevada. The biggest drop, of more than 50 percent, was in Fort Myers, Fla.

President Barack Obama visited Fort Myers earlier this week in an effort to sell his economic rescue package, which lawmakers are preparing to send to his desk by today.

The states in which sales rose — Nevada, California, Arizona, Florida, Minnesota and Virginia — are places where buyers have been able to snap up foreclosed homes at a bargain. Sales more than doubled in Nevada, rose 85 percent in California, and nearly 43 percent in Arizona.

“We see a pattern of strong sales gains, particularly in lower-price homes, in areas with price declines resulting from foreclosures,” Lawrence Yun, the trade group’s chief economist, said in a prepared statement.

In California and Florida, sales of distressed properties accounted for about two-thirds of all sales, compared with about 45 percent nationally.

A nasty brew of strict lending standards, falling home values, soaring foreclosures and a severe recession is filtering through the housing market.

Nationwide, more than 274,000 homes received at least one foreclosure-related notice in January, according to RealtyTrac Inc., an Irvine, Calif.-based foreclosure listing service.

That was down 10 percent from December but still up 18 percent from the same month a year ago. The numbers would have been higher if not for efforts to stall the foreclosure process.

More than 2 million American homeowners faced foreclosure proceedings last year, and that number could soar as high as 10 million in the coming years depending on the severity of the recession, according to a report last month by Credit Suisse.