No matter who’s measuring, the results are the same: Housing prices are tumbling at the sharpest rates ever with a bottom still at least a year away, economists say.

Both the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller home price indices and the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight index on Tuesday reported record year-over-year declines in April, a sobering signal that the housing slump not only is deepening, but also engulfing markets once above water.

The last holdout in the Case-Shiller index, Charlotte, N.C., finally succumbed to the national housing downturn, with prices slipping 0.1 percent from a year ago. No city in the Case-Shiller 20-city index appreciated in April, the first time that’s happened since its inception in 2000.

“I think that’s the most disturbing part of the report,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Economy.com. “It shows the declines are now across all markets, that this is a nationwide housing collapse rather than one in a few markets.”

The 20-city index dropped by 15.3 percent in April versus last year, while the narrower 10-city index plunged 16.3 percent, its biggest decline in its 21-year history.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 25th, 2008 at 7:55 pm and is filed under Real Estate. Tags: Charlotte Mark Zandi . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.