WASHINGTON — A federal government home-price index posted the sharpest decline in its 17-year history, but home prices in most areas of Colorado showed gains.
The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight said Thursday that home prices nationally fell 3.1 percent in the first quarter, compared with last year.
It was only the second quarter of price declines since the index started in 1991.
The price index first declined on a year-over-year basis in the final quarter of 2007, when it dropped 0.45 percent.
The index recorded a 2.29 percent gain in home values for all of Colorado during the year, including increases of under 1 percent for Denver-Aurora, Colorado Springs and Fort Collins.
Home prices in Greeley were down 2.53 percent and up 9.1 percent in Grand Junction.
The OFHEO index is much broader geographically than another closely watched measure, the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller index, which has captured large declines in the majority of the 20 largest U.S. metro areas, including Denver.
The government index tracks mortgage loans of $417,000 or less that are bought or backed by the government-sponsored mortgage-finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Excluded are the subprime and other “exotic” mortgages behind the current housing woes in states such as California, Florida and Nevada, where rapidly falling home prices are skewing the national results.
Prices fell in 43 states, with California and Nevada showing the biggest declines.
Home prices dropped by more than 8 percent in those states.
