August 31, 2008

By Gail MarksJarvis

The first hint of good news about housing showed up last week. But it was tentative.

Home prices are still declining, dropping a shocking 15.9 percent nationally from a year earlier. But the pace of the decline slowed. In other words, the decline is awful, but seemingly not as bad as it has been.

It was enough to catch the attention of Karl Case, one of two people who designed the Case-Shiller Index, a key barometer for watching home prices. With the release of June numbers last week, he said, a three-month trend perhaps suggests that the worst of the housing wreck has occurred.

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