EAST GREENWICH — Susan Marsh knew it was time to let go of her family house on Bunker Hill Lane.

So two years ago, the 81-year-old retired college professor began to look around for something smaller.

Letting go, it turned out, was easy. The hard part was selling.

The house boasted five bedrooms, three-and-a-half bathrooms, a Jacuzzi, two walk-in closets, hardwood floors, central air conditioning, an eat-in kitchen. In August 2006, her real estate agent listed it for $585,000.

Over the next 1½ years, the agent reduced the price seven times. She even took the house off the market and put it back on (sometimes the same day) as a “new” listing — five times — before it finally sold, two months ago, for $467,500.

“Price is everything,” said the property’s listing agent, Debbie Chennisi, of Keller Williams Realty. “If you want to sell your property, you have to price it right.”

Now, as house prices tumble and For Sale signs multiply, the question dogging anyone trying to sell a house is what price is right?

The Rhode Island Association of Realtors today reported that the median price of a single-family house in the state during the first three months of this year fell nearly 10 percent, to $245,000, compared with $272,000 a year earlier. And sales were off 23 percent from the same period last year.

Providence, Johnston, Pawtucket and Woonsocket recorded among the steepest first-quarter price declines, though the deterioration was not limited to the urban areas, the Realtors data shows. Barrington, Coventry, North Kingstown and West Greenwich also recorded price declines in excess of the statewide average.

Yet, for reasons as inscrutable as the particular characteristics of certain markets and the volatility of small data samples, house prices in 14 Rhode Island communities rose, the data shows. On Providence’s East Side, for example, single-family house prices during the first-quarter jumped 10 percent compared with the same period last year.

House prices also climbed by “double digit percentages” in eight other communities, the Realtors reported, including Little Compton, Middletown, Jamestown, Warren, Scituate, South Kingstown, Narragansett and East Greenwich.

If this is the start of a turnaround, as some in the real estate business have suggested, economic forecasters beg to disagree. The latest forecast by Moody’s Economy.com predicts that house prices in Rhode Island will fall another 13 percentage points before the market hits bottom at the end of next year. If the prediction is accurate, house prices here will have fallen 20 percent from their peak at the end of 2005. (The forecast is based on the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index, which compares repeat sales.)

Prices for more expensive houses generally fall less sharply during real estate downturns than lower-priced properties, primarily because “richer families who buy higher tier housing have better balance sheets,” said Andres Carbacho-Burgos, an economist at Moody’s Economy.com. “So the demand for upper tier housing tends to be somewhat more stable.”

Yet, even in more affluent communities, pricing a house is like trying to hit a moving target. Just ask Chennisi, who along with her husband, Mike, sells real estate out of their home office in East Greenwich. They say that the slower the sales, the harder it is to get a handle on where prices are headed.

“Normally in a very busy market, you focus on sales,” said Mike Chennisi. “But if there aren’t enough, you have to tweak the criteria.”

His analysis of 11 colonials sold in East Greenwich during the first quarter was startling: prices, on average, were running about 20 percent less than the assessed property values. Yet, the same analysis of 15 colonials sold in the town during March, April and May showed the prices were off by just over 8 percent.

“It’s continually changing,” he said.

The situation, no doubt, frustrates sellers who want to know what their houses will sell for — and when. The Realtors Association reports the average “days-on-market,” but those numbers get “really skewed” by agents taking properties off the Multiple Listing Service and re-listing them again under new MLS numbers, said Debbie Chennisi.

At the current pace of sales, it would take 15 months to sell all of the 6,240 single-family houses on the market as of the end of March, up from 11 months during the same period last year, according to a Journal analysis of MLS inventory data.

The house on Bunker Hill Lane that took just over 1½ years to sell was under purchase agreements “multiple times,” Chennisi said, but the deals fell through when the prospective buyers couldn’t sell their own houses.

The final sale price was 20 percent less than the original list price in 2006 — and $138,450 less than the property’s assessed value of $605,950, according to the online appraisal by Appraisal Resource.

Susan Marsh, the property’s former owner, now lives in a retirement community in the Boston area, near her children and grandchildren. She said yesterday that she’s relieved to have it all behind her — and appreciates her agent’s hard work. Now, she is trying to figure out how to fit all of her accumulated letters and photos into her new one-bedroom apartment.

“I have six cartons of photos,” she said, “what am I going to do with them?”

Her next purchase, she said, will be a paper shredder.

2008 FIRST-QUARTER R.I. SINGLE-FAMILY HOME SALES

3-MONTH SALES LISTED WITH MEDIAN PRICES AND DAYS ON THE MARKET

Ranked by median price percentage change

No single-family home sales were recorded on New Shoreham.

Information is provided by State-Wide Multiple Listing Service, Inc. Readers are cautioned that the median sales price — with half the prices higher and half lower — generally reflects the quality and the mix (type and size) of the properties being sold at the time and is not an true measure of home values. Information deemed reliable but is not guaranteed.

THE PROVIDENCE JOURNAL/BILL TROBERMAN

larditi@projo.com