Phoenix Metro home prices continued their decline in December, and are expected to keep dropping for the foreseeable future.

Since 2008, 11 percent of the single-family homes in Maricopa County, Arizona, have been through foreclosure — 4 percent in the last year alone. And with moratoriums on foreclosures ending, the new year is expected to start with an uptick in the number of property owners losing their homes.

Once the envy of most of the nation, Arizona's real estate industry has become a cautionary tale, and the new story of recovery is one of fits and starts.

Housing prices in the Phoenix-metro area are likely to continue dropping for the next several months, says Karl Guntermann, professor of finance and real estate who compiles the Arizona State University-Repeat Sales Index (ASU-RSI).

It's not unusual for the real estate market to slide into the doldrums in the fall and winter, but the Phoenix market was all but becalmed in November.

At first glance, the drop in year-over-year Phoenix housing prices recorded in the October Arizona State University-Repeat Sales Index (ASU-RSI) could appear to be unmitigated bad news: this means prices compared to a year ago dropped for the third consecutive month.

Price declines hit the Phoenix resale market for a second month in a row in September, with the drop accelerating to 4 percent, according to the latest ASU-Repeat Sales Report (ASU-RSI), released this week by the W. P. Carey School of Business.

The slumping Phoenix real estate market reached an ironic point in October where it was both "boring" and scary at the same time, according to Associate Professor of Real Estate Jay Butler, author of the W. P. Carey School's monthly resale home market report.

In his latest Realty Studies Report, Jay Butler, associate professor of real estate at the W. P. Carey School, finds that 46 percent of the home transactions recorded in Phoenix in September were foreclosures — the highest percentage level of foreclosure activity since March.

Commercial real estate matters because it's a proxy for a city's economic health. When an economy grows, companies expand into new offices, warehouses and storefronts. Vacancy rates fall, property prices rise, and developers launch new projects.