It’s not surprising that home prices are down. What is a bit surprising is how resilient home prices appear to be after all the shock waves of foreclosures, short sales, subprime implosions, reverberrations in the jumbo mortgage market, and so on.

Take the Standard & Poors/Case-Shiller Home Price Index. It has a declining annual growth rate in prices of existing single family homes across the United States down for the past 18 months. The annual decline for their 10-City Composite index is 3.4%. The comparable figure for their 20-City Composite is 2.9%.

Now, let’s look at their latest figures. It’s for the year ending in March 2007. The biggest decline in Detroit, with a -8.4% drop. But that’s more than offset by a 10% gain in Seattle.

These are one-year results through March, 2007

U.S. National Index -1.4%

Atlanta 2.0%
Boston -4.9%
Charlotte 7.4%
Chicago 1.3%
Cleveland -2.4%
Dallas 1.6%
Denver -2.0%
Detroit -8.4%
Las Vegas -1.6%
Los Angeles -1.4%
Miami 1.0%
Minneapolis -1.9%
New York -1.1%
Phoenix -3.0%
Portland 7.0%
San Diego -6.0%
San Francisco -2.3%
Seattle 10.0%
Tampa -3.0%
Washington -4.8%

Composite-10 -1.9%
Composite-20 -1.4%

Source: Standard & Poor’s
Data through March 2007

The way I look at these numbers? Home prices will slide lower for a long time to come. This will be a period of stagnation in the home market.