S&P/Case Shiller: Home prices down 17.1% in May

The latest home price figures from S&P/Case-Shiller just hit the tape. They showed a 17.1% year-over-year decline in the 20 cities tracked by the research group. That was smaller than the 17.9% forecast of economists polled by Bloomberg. It was also down from 18.1% a month earlier.

On a month-over-month basis, prices rose 0.45%, the first monthly increase since July 2006. I should note that I'm not a big fan of monthly numbers; You really want to follow year-over-year trends as they eliminate the impact of seasonality. Prices are still falling in every city from a year earlier, with the smallest decline in Dallas at -4.1% and the biggest drop in Phoenix at -34.2%.