Feds: Tampa ranks 260 out of 292 for price drops

As the last blog posting made clear, the Tampa area is an increasingly affordable home buying market. But it comes at a price.

In the past year we're one of the worst hit metro areas in the nation when it comes to price declines, according to the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight.

The agency said Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater prices are down 8.46 percent the past year, 3.81 percent lower from quarter to quarter. Over the past 5 years we're still way up at 61.4 percent.

I'm not sure about the accuracy of the Fed's numbers. The agency itself has struggled to make its numbers correspond more closely to the widely cited Case-Shiller home price index. (Case Shiller's last report said Tampa prices were down 17.5 percent year to year)

But assuming the agency's price tracking methodology is consistent across the nation, the relative rankings are probably pretty sound. In the state rankings, Florida ranked third worst. No surprise at all.

Here's the whole file chock full of stuff. Skip ahead to Page 38 to see Tampa's data: Download homedata.pdf