This house on Adelphi Avenue, Providence, is up for sale.

The Providence Journal / Mary Murphy

Rhode Island’s housing market showed signs of quickening deterioration during the third quarter as single-family house prices dipped, sales sank and selling time lengthened.

The Rhode Island Association of Realtors reported today that the median price of a single-family house fell 2.2 percent, to $279,900, compared with $286,500 during the same period last year. That is nearly double the rate of decline last year, when the third-quarter median price fell 1.2 percent from the same period in 2005.

Patrick Newport, a housing economist at Global Insight, said that nationwide house prices are “starting to drop at faster rates,” especially in areas that have been hard hit by foreclosures on risky, or “subprime,” mortgages.

“It’s a bigger problem in Rhode Island … than in other New England states,” Newport said. “Houses [are] going into foreclosure in a market already saturated with unsold homes ... so you’re probably going to have steeper price declines coming up.”

(Global Insight forecasts that the median house price in Rhode Island will bottom out at $262,450 in the second quarter of next year and then rise through the end of the decade.) For the first nine months of this year, the median price was $276,000, down 3.2 percent from the first nine months of last year and the first decline in the January-through-September period in a dozen years.

The real-estate market weakness is especially evident in the dramatic slowdown in house sales. The Association of Realtors reports that single-family house sales during the third quarter plunged 8.56 percent from the same period last year. During the last two years, the Realtors reported that house sales have fallen 27.5 percent.

The average selling time stretched to 84 days, compared with 74 days during the third quarter of last year, and 61 days during the same period in 2005.

The real-estate slowdown, while more dramatic in the areas known for rising foreclosures, is also showing its effects on the East Side of Providence. The median price of a single-family house on the East Side during July, August and September plunged 14.7 percent, to $461,500 — the lowest since the third quarter of 2003, according to the Realtors. During the same three months last year, the median price was $541,000.

“If you bought two years ago, you would probably get that price or a little bit less right now,” said Suzanne Knight, a real-estate agent with Coleman Realtors on the East Side. “We’re still seeing high-end houses on the market going in a day or two … I think it’s all how you price it.”

The Realtors Association reported 53 single-family house sales on the East Side during the third quarter, up from 48 sales during the same period last year.

The East Side has generally faired better than other areas of the state, Knight said, because it has remained largely insulated from the subprime lending problems. But the more affluent areas are not immune to the tightening of mortgage credit.

“In August, markets just froze and that had a pretty big impact on jumbo loans which are used to finance the $1-million houses,” said Global Insight’s Newport. Buyers can still get jumbo loans, he said, but banks are not as eager to make them because investors won’t buy them, so they tend to cost more.

The Realtors’ report showed that of all of Rhode Island’s cities and towns, 31 reported declines in median prices in the third quarter and eight reported increases.

The report generally concurs with a separate one last week by The Warren Group, of Boston, showing even steeper price and sales declines in Rhode Island during July, August and September — the period immediately following the onset of the crisis in the national mortgage markets

(The association’s data is based on sales through real-estate agents only, whereas The Warren Group also includes sales by owners.)

The Warren Group reported that single-family house prices in Rhode Island during the third quarter fell 4.8 percent and sales were down 14 percent from the same period last year.

The Warren Group reported that the median price of a single-family house during the quarter fell to $257,000, compared with $270,000 a year earlier, and sales dropped to 2,305, down from 2,681 during the same period last year.

So far this year, the median price has fallen 3.7 percent, according to The Warren Group,

The Warren Group’s chief executive officer, Timothy Warren Jr., said in a statement last week that rising foreclosures are “playing a part in declining home prices.”

Rhode Island Housing reported that foreclosures in Providence in September spiked 53 percent.

CORRECTION: A photo caption that originally accompanied this story incorrectly indicated the status of the home shown.

larditi@projo.com