Home prices slid 5.6 percent in the New York metropolitan are, which includes North Jersey, during 2007, the S&P/Case - Shiller Home Price Indices reported Tuesday. That decline was not as large as the 9.1 percent drop in Case-Schiller's 20-city composite index. And it was dwarfed by the plunging prices in several deeply troubled real estate markets, including Miami, Las Vegas and Phoenix - all down by more than 15 percent. "We reached a somber yearend for the housing market in 2007," said Robert J. Schiller, a Yale economist who helped create the indices. "Home prices across the nation and in the metro areas are significantly lower than where they were a year ago. Wherever you look, things look bleak." Only three metropolitan areas - Charlotte, NC; Portland, Ore.; and Seattle - posted increases, and they were small. Even after they decline, New York metropolitan area home prices remain twice as high as they were in 2000, as a result of a long housing boom that peaked in 2005. "Buyers still complain that this is an expensive market," Atilio Adamo of Prudential Adamo Realty in Paramus. He agreed with Case-Shiller that prices have dropped about 5 percent over the past year - but added that they have dropped about 15 percent to 20 percent from the market peak in 2005. Nelson Chen, a real estate agent with the Chen Agency in Fort Lee, also said the S&P/Case-Shiller numbers match his own estimates of home-price declines in North Jersey. And he said the report of lower prices may encourage wary buyers to enter the market as the busy spring buying season nears. Many have been hanging back, waiting for prices to bottom out. "This is fabulous news to me," he said. "This should show everyone who's waiting for it to go down that now we've documented that it did go down. The public needs to hear that." Both Adamo and Chen said that while many sellers are pricing their homes realistically, some are still clinging to the hope they can get what their neighbors received a year or two ago. "If you're going to list at last year's prices, you'll price yourself out of the market," Adamo said. Also on Tuesday, RealtyTrac Inc. reported that 1.5 percent of the homes in New Jersey were in some stage of foreclosure in January. The total number of foreclosure auctions, 5,113, was down 15.7 percent from a year ago, counter to a nationwide trend. The state ranked 18th nationwide in the percentage of homeowners in default on their mortgages. The highest rates were in Nevada, California and Florida. Nationally, the rate of foreclosure filings - which include default notices, auction sales notices and bank repossessions - was up 57 percent from January 2007.