Home values in Yuma down 12 percent

  Homes in the Yuma area continue to decline in value, to the tune of about a 3 percent loss per quarter, totaling a 12 percent loss over the last year, the Yuma County assessor says.

  But other parts of the state are feeling it much worse.

  "We are much better off in our part of the state than they are in other metropolitan areas," said Assessor Joe Wehrle, referring to the Phoenix and Tucson areas.

  Wehrle said "the bubble burst in Yuma County in the third quarter of 2007" when home values went from $233,067 in the second quarter of 2007 to $205,812 in the third quarter of 2007.

  Then, he said values rebounded in the fourth quarter of 2007 and in the first quarter of 2008, when home values rose to $217,673.

  From there, it's been about a 3 percent loss per quarter, going as low as around $190,000 in the fourth quarter of 2008.

  Wehrle said the values are based on home sales of both new and used homes in Yuma County and do not include refinanced homes.

  The rural parts of Arizona are fairing better than other areas across the state, Wehrle said.

  His comments came Tuesday on the heels of new figures from the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) that show that the value of the average home in the state is down nearly 15.2 percent from a year earlier.

  The FHFA figures showed a drop of nearly 7.2 percent in home values in the Yuma area over the past year. But unlike the Yuma County numbers, FHFA values are based on both home sales and appraisals done on houses that were just refinanced.

  The valuation figures are considered a key indicator of what homes, on average, actually are worth. That is because FHFA tracks both the sale and government-backed refinancing of the same houses.

  By contrast, indexes that rely on median sales figures for a market simply measure the prices of the homes that change hands in that particular month or quarter.

  There also are some differences in the way FHFA gauges values in comparison to the SandP/Case-Shiller Home Price Index.

  The latter uses data from county recorders versus mortgage values. It also is a weighted index, with changes in the prices of more expensive homes having a greater influence on the overall numbers.

  The decline in values is not uniform around the state. According to the FHFA, the year-over-year drop in the Phoenix metro area exceeded 18.8 percent. When just home sales are considered and not refinancing, that figure jumps to 26 percent.

  FHFA economists computed only overall valuation numbers for the rest of the state.

  For the Tucson area, the annual decline was nearly 11.3 percent. That compares with 7.6 percent in Flagstaff, almost 16.0 percent in the Kingman-Lake Havasu area and more than 13.1 percent in the Prescott area.

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Stephanie A. Wilken can be reached at swilken@yumasun.com or 539-6857. Capitol Media Services contributed to this report.