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PHOENIX — The continued rapid fall of housing prices in Arizona has now wiped out any gains of the past year and is starting to eat into the appreciated values homeowners saw in the last five.

New figures from the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight show that homes in Arizona actually are worth less now than they were the same time a year earlier. The last time Arizona experienced such a year-over-year drop was 1990.

Spurring that was the fact that home values slid by nearly a full percentage point in just the three-month period between July 1 and Sept. 30. That's on top of a decline of nearly three tenths of a percent the prior quarter.

That means a home that was worth $200,000 on April 1 slid to $199,420 by June 30 — and $197,446 at the end of the last quarter.

Only seven states had greater one-year declines in home values.

Year-over-year home values in the Phoenix metropolitan area also officially slid into red, dropping by nearly three-quarters of a percent. But that is still better than Yuma, where values are down more than a percentage point, or the Lake Havasu-Kingman area, where home values are down almost 3 percent in a year.

The OFHEO figures are a significant indicator of the actual value of homes. That's because the agency tracks average price changes in repeat sales and refinancings of the same single-family properties, using statistics from mortgage transactions.

By contrast, other indicators are based only on the homes that actually sold in each quarter.

Of all the individual communities monitored, only Tucson home prices actually showed some sign of life, rising nearly a percentage point in the last quarter.

But even in Tucson, OFHEO said the soft market is taking its toll.

Home values on Sept. 30 were up about 73.5 percent from five years earlier. But that five-year change just three months ago was pegged at more than 79 percent.

The housing picture in the rest of the nation, most of which has not had superheated price increases in the last five years, is not looking much better: OFHEO reports this is the first time in nearly 13 years that quarter-over-quarter values have declined.

And while year-over-year values still are up, that 1.8 percent figure is the lowest the agency has recorded since 1995.

Patrick Lawler, the agency's chief economist, said the problem is obvious: Too many homes and too few buyers.

"Rising inventories of for-sale properties are clearly having a material impact on home prices," he said in a prepared statement. "Until those inventories shrink, that will be a great source of resistance to price increases."

Two of Arizona's neighboring states — California and Nevada — were among the seven with greater rates of annual housing value declines.

But Utah home values actually are up nearly 13 percent, a figure listed as the highest in the nation, with New Mexico fourth with a 7.4 percent increase.

On StarNet: Visit azstarnet.com/homes for listings of homes sold.