U.S. home-prices index falls in January; <br> builder Lennar Corp.’s earnings fall 27%

U.S. home prices fell in January, dipping 0.2 percent below year-ago levels, according to today’s Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller home-price index. It was the first year-over-year decline for the 20-region index since it began keeping such records in January 2001, Bloomberg News said.
Eleven of the 20 metro areas saw year-over-year declines, led by slumps of 6.9 percent in Detroit and 5.6 percent in Boston; prices rose in eight areas and were steady in one. Compared with December, prices declined in 17 of the 20 areas and rose in only one.
The news is “a good indicator of the dire state of the U.S. residential real estate market” said Robert Shiller, chief economist at MacroMarkets LLC and a professor at Yale University, told Bloomberg.
Also today, Lennar Corp. of Miami, the nation’s largest homebuilder by revenue, said its earnings fell 73 percent in the quarter ended Feb. 28 to $68.6 million or 43 cents per share from $258.1 million or $1.58 per share in the year-ago period. “While some markets are performing better than others,” CEO Stuart Miller said in a statement, “the typically stronger spring selling season has not yet materialized.”
The reports add to the gloom instilled by yesterday’s government report that new-home sales plunged in February, and RealtyTrac’s report that foreclosure filings last month surged 12 percent above year-ago levels. “The business is still very soft,” Robert Curran, a homebuilding analyst at Fitch Ratings in New York, told Bloomberg.

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