Home Prices: There's No Quick Recovery Ahead

So, is our long national nightmare over? Has the housing market finally hit bottom?

There has been some muted -- albeit exhausted -- cheering from homeowners in recent weeks. But before we break out the champagne, look out for further potential problems just down the road.


Scott Pollack
The good news? According to the closely watched Case-Shiller Home Price Index, which tracks home prices across 20 major cities nationwide, the three-year housing slump slowed sharply in April and May.

May's decline was just 0.2%, the slowest in two years. And several cities actually saw prices rise -- among them Denver, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Boston, Cleveland and Dallas.

Even Miami only fell about 1% in May. That's a great month down there. Previously, prices had been falling 3% a month.

We'll get an even better picture of the situation when the Case-Shiller figures for June are released on Aug. 25.

But these data aren't the only hopeful signs.

Inventories of unsold homes have come down. According to the National Association of Realtors, there were about 3.8 million unsold homes on the market at the end of June. That's down a long way from 4.5 million a year ago.

And yes, housing affordability is dramatically better. People, obviously, need to live somewhere. At some point, housing gets cheap enough that the fundamentals start to look good.

The average home is about a third cheaper than it was at the peak three years ago, a plunge unprecedented since the Great Depression. In the hardest-hit places, such as Phoenix, Las Vegas and Miami, average prices have been halved or better from their bubble peaks.

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FORTRUST Data Center's AppSafe Enables Virtualized Disaster Recovery

FORTRUST Data Center, a provider of data center services in Colorado, announced a managed disaster recovery service, AppSafe, to provide “safe, affordable, and flexible solution to ensure the rapid recovery of business-critical applications in the event of an outage or disaster.”



AppSafe is built on the latest virtualization technologies allowing business applications and data to be replicated to a virtual environment. With this, an image of a customer’s server is maintained in FORTRUST’s virtual server environment. In the event of an outage, data is activated in the virtual environment and end-users are re-routed to access applications and resume business functions.

In effect, AppSafe provides a cost-effective, fully supported disaster recovery strategy with no requirement for capital expenditure, officials said.

“With this new service, businesses will have the option to remotely execute a full server recovery or achieve immediate failover using a high-availability solution,” said Rob McClary, vice president of FORTRUST, in a statement. “The key benefit for SMBs is affordable disaster recovery with no previous hardware investment.”

AppSafe, along with FORTRUST’s portfolio of backup and storage services, provides an end-to-end disaster recovery solution for customers, officials commented.

FORTRUST recently announced  that it will offer Remote Data Backup services powered by Incentra to both current customers and companies that are not colocated in the data center. The service will allow companies operating in multiple locations to back up their data to one secure location.


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