According to the Feds Nashville home prices are holding

Nashville continues to ride out bubble
5/22/2008 -The Tennessean
The correction in home prices has sped up in the cities that benefited most from the housing bubble, but the federal government still says Nashville’s valuations are holding up.
The latest figures from the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight show that prices for homes sold in the first three months of 2008 dropped 3.1 percent nationally over the past year.
That’s a record, and adding in homes that were simply refinanced — but not sold — didn’t change the overall picture of declining values. The office’s pricing index of sold and refinanced homes dropped 0.03 percent, also a bad sign.
Reprising a familiar tune, though, the data show that price declines were pretty much confined to the bubble markets. Only 14 of the 50 states, plus the District of Columbia, experienced price declines, with the worst hit being California and Nevada. There, prices dropped by more than 10 percent.
In Tennessee, prices actually rose 3.9 percent, the OFHEO said, the 10th best performance in the country. In the Nashville area, the gain was the same 3.9 percent, placing our region in the top 20 percent among metropolitan areas.
Basically, the feds’ numbers depict the flip side of the boom, when prices were supercharged in a few markets but fairly consistent with inflation and population growth in most. Now prices in those once overheated markets are collapsing at breakneck speed, turning homeowners’ euphoria into angst.
But in the majority of markets, homes continue to be appraised and sell at values as high or higher than before.
That analysis is not much consolation, I know, to the thousands of local homeowners who have been waiting months to sell their homes for what they believe they are worth. But nearly two years into the housing slump, it’s hard to ignore a pattern that’s held up throughout.
The worsening economy may yet drag down the local housing market as well, as one prominent research firm, Moody’s Economy.com, now predicts.
As far as the popping bubble itself is concerned, Nashville and Tennessee appear to to have been spared.