The Standard & Poor’s/Case-Schiller home price index showed on Wednesday a 6.1% record price drop since October 2006 in 20 metropolitan areas, the largest in the last 10 years.

Ten of the metropolitan areas recorded the most significant drop since 1991, reaching 6.7%, compared cu 6.3% 16 years ago.

Robert Schiller, chief economist at Macro Markets LLC, said that “no matter how you look at these data, it is obvious that the current state of the single-family housing market remains grim.”

Among the metropolitan areas with the largest drops, Miami comes first with 12.4%, followed by Tampa, with a 11.8% drop, 11.2% in Detroit and 11.1% in San Diego.

There were however positive growth rates in three areas, out of which Charlotte gained the most, 4.3%, then came Seattle with 3.3%, and Portland with 1.9%.

Looking at the index from a month-to-month perspective, the percentages dropped 1.6 in October compared to September, which makes this the tenth consecutive month of continuous decline.

According to Joshua Shapiro, chief economist for Maria Fiorini Ramirez Inc, home prices are to considerably decline taking into account the harder to obtain mortgages and the increasing number of unsold homes, and the tendency will comprise the same major metropolitan areas.

2008 will be a difficult year, and analyst researchers are reserved in making predictions on a challenging market such as this.

Figures can be easily overturned by a great deal of factors. For examples, the increasing number of cheaper homes sold compared to more expensive ones, the negative the price trend will be.

David Blitzer, chairman of S&P/Case-Schiller, said in a Bloomberg interview: “There is no silver lining. If you look across the cities, more often than not, the bigger run-up, the more it comes down. There is no clear sign of a bottom in these numbers.”