Twin Cities home prices stagnant in November

A widely watched gauge of home prices indicates the Twin Cities area home prices were basically flat in November.

The Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller home price index shows prices edged up only slightly -- 0.3 percent -- from October to November 2009 in the metro area. Prices were also flat between September and October, following more substantial gains in previous months.

On a year-over-year basis, prices were down roughly 7 percent between November 2008 and November 2009.

David Blitzer of Standard & Poor's says prices in the Twin Cities jumped from one extreme to the other in 2009. He says that volatility likely won't continue. But other questions remain.

"The big unknown for any city, presumably including Minneapolis, still is foreclosures. The foreclosures tend to be sort of episodic and don't tend to cover any clear pattern," said Blitzer. "If one gets a month or two with unusually high foreclosure events, you probably depress prices with those couple months."

The S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indexes show some mixed signals on a nationwide basis. The rate of year-over-year declines in home prices is slowing. But home prices in some markets hit new lows in November.

The chairman of the Index Committee at Standard & Poor's says there is still "no clear sign of a sustained, broad-based recovery" in the housing sector.