The largest 20 U.S. cities, according to a private survey by Standard and Poor’s/Case-Shiller released this week, saw a 19 per cent fall year-over-year as of January 2009, while a separate index confirmed a 19.4 per cent decline in the 10 largest metropolitan areas.

“There are very few bright spots that one can see in the data. Most of the nation appears to remain on a downward path,” said head of Standard and Poor’s index committee, David Blitzer, “with all of the 20 metro areas reporting annual declines, and nine of the MSAs (metropolitan statistical areas) falling more than 20% in the last year.”

Somewhat unfortunately for homeowners in these areas, Phoenix, Arizona (35 per cent); Las Vegas, Nevada (32.5 per cent) and San Fransisco (32.4 per cent) took the largest hits, while cities such as Dallas, Denver and Cleveland showed declines of less than 5 per cent — marking the smallest declines on the large-cities index.

The twenty-largest index has seen losses of 30 per cent since the peak (in roughly June 2006). The cities mentioned before have seen very serious peak losses, with Phoenix still at the top with a 48.5 per cent loss.

The U.S. National Association of Realtors, a professional group for real estate agents, said earlier last week that sales of previously occupied (non-new) homes rose in February sparking thoughts of recovery — economists, however, suggest that the recovery may not be ready quite yet, many saying that we have not hit the bottom of home prices yet.

Many first-time buyers and risk-taking investors took advantage of the deep decline in values and huge discounts seen on foreclosures in the last month, while homeowners became more realistic about current-market prices; sparking an unexpected increase in sales.

In the U.S., 1.4 million homes have been foreclosed upon since 2007, though 2005 and 2006 saw rising foreclosures, suggesting that the subprime crisis may have only been a catalyst in U.S. foreclosures.

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