Price drop slams US home sales

Published: 12 Nov 2008 18:02:24 PST

ONE-THIRD of US homeowners who sold their property in the 12 months through September lost money as foreclosures depressed prices and more Americans became unemployed in a weakening economy, Zillow.com reported yesterday.

Home values fell 9.7 percent in the third quarter, the seventh consecutive decline, to a median US$202,966, Seattle-based Zillow, a seller of real estate data, said in the report.

One in seven homeowners had negative equity, or owed more on their mortgages than their houses were worth, Bloomberg News reported.

"It's clear we are at a unique point in history," Stan Humphries, Zillow's vice president of data and analytics, said in a statement. "We've had seven consecutive quarters of decline, and we expect that to continue until at least the middle of next year," Humphries said.