Although sales of existing homes fell in 45 states during the October-December quarter, South Dakota was the lone state to show a sales increase, according to the National Association of Realtors.

Existing home sales here rose 8.9 percent from the same quarter a year ago. That good news for South Dakota is good news for local Realtors. They have been saying for more than a year that the markets here are not in the same predicament as markets such as Nevada and California.

"All real estate is local" has become a mantra for Realtors trying to distance themselves from slumping markets in other parts of the country.

Realtors and builders in the Rapid City have bemoaned the bad press, and they fear that reluctant Black Hills buyers will turn the bad news into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

"We would really like to get the word out that things are not all negative. We would like to change the perception," Sheila Tom, president of the Black Hills Board of Realtors, said earlier this week. "Because of the negative publicity nationally, buyers are hesitating; they are stalled."

The Black Hills Board of Realtors did not have comparable fourth-quarter numbers available Thursday. But for all 12 months of 2007, overall residential sales in Rapid City and surrounding cities were down about 3 percent. However, the average sale price in 2007 rose 13 percent to $187,096.

In North Dakota, sales were unchanged in the fourth quarter, according to the NAR report. No sales figures were available for Idaho, Indiana and New Hampshire. Sales also fell in Washington, D.C.

The states suffering the biggest drop in sales in the third quarter were Nevada, down 44 percent and Wyoming, down 42 percent. Other states with big declines were New Mexico, down 39 percent, Oregon, down 38 percent and Arizona, down 37.6 percent.

Metropolitan areas showed growing weakness, the real-estate trade group said Thursday. The fourth-quarter data from the National Association of Realtors underscore the breadth of the housing market's slump.

Median home prices fell in more than half of the 150 metropolitan areas surveyed. Out of the 77 that experienced declines, 16 showed double-digit percentage drops, the trade group said. The largest price declines were found in Lansing, Mich., Sacramento, Calif., Jackson, Miss., and Riverside, Calif., which posted price declines of 17 to 19 percent.

Lawrence Yun, the trade group's chief economist, attributed the declines in median prices to mortgage market problems that mushroomed last fall, making loans more expensive for borrowers looking to take out "jumbo" mortgages larger than $417,000, the maximum size of mortgages that government-sponsored mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac can buy and market as securities.

"The continuing crunch in the jumbo loan market that began in August has disproportionately reduced the number of transactions in higher price ranges," Yun said in a prepared statement.

Nationwide, existing homes sold at an annual rate of 4.96 million units in the fourth quarter, down 21 percent from the sales pace of the fourth quarter in 2006, the Realtors group said.

Mortgage lenders, would-be homebuyers and Wall Street investors alike have been grappling over the past year with the impact of rising defaults, the result of lax lending standards that were prevalent during this decade's housing boom. As defaults have risen, lenders have grown more cautious, which has allowed fewer buyers to qualify for home loans.

Journal staff writer Dan Daly contributed to this report.