I’m trying to limit the number of doom and gloom posts here on HIB, but it’s hard to ignore this one.

From Bloomberg: Home Sales Fall, Record Drop in Prices

Home resales in the U.S. dropped in October and prices fell by the most on record, signaling a deepening housing recession going into 2009.

Purchases of existing homes slid to an annual rate of 4.98 million, lower than forecast, a National Association of Realtors report showed in Washington. The median price fell 11.3 percent from a year earlier, the most since the group began collecting data in 1968.

More:

“The large number of homes already on the market and the number of those that will appear via foreclosure over the next several months only add to the diminished prospects for existing home sales,” Maxwell Clarke, chief U.S. economist at IDEAglobal in New York, said before the report.

From the NY Times: Home Prices Plunge In October

Sales of previously owned homes fell 3.1 percent for the month, to an annual rate of 4.98 million, according to the National Association of Realtors, a private trade group. Of the homes that did find buyers in October, nearly half were the result of a sale after a foreclosure.

Read that again. Of all the sales of pre-existing home is October, almost half of them were due to a foreclosure.