Home prices in the Charlotte area fell in March to their lowest levels since the real estate bubble burst, a report released Tuesday shows.

The decline is part of a long-anticipated double dip in the national housing market fueled by weak sales, continued foreclosures and persistent economic uncertainty. Experts say it could take a year or more for prices to begin climbing again.

Prices in the metro area slid 2.4percent from February and 6.8percent from March 2010, according to the closely watched S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index. It was the fourth straight month that prices in Charlotte hit a new low since their pre-recession peak.

Housing prices continued to weaken across the U.S., too, falling year over year in all but one of the 20 markets the index tracks, Washington, D.C. Prices there rose 4.3 percent from March 2010, the Case-Shiller report said. In Seattle, prices climbed 0.1 percent from February but remained down 7.5 percent over the year, the report found.

Meanwhile, a dozen metro areas, plus the national index and 20-city average, saw prices fall below their spring 2009 lows, confirming a double dip in the housing market, said David Blitzer, chairman of the index committee at Standard & Poor's. Overall, U.S. home prices are back to their mid-2002 levels.

"Home prices continue on their downward spiral with no relief in sight," Blitzer said.

Prices rebounded in 2009 and 2010, largely because of the government's first-time-homebuyer tax credits, but "excluding the results of that policy, there has been no recovery or even stabilization in home prices during or after the recent recession," he said.

Housing prices could remain deflated for years because of excessive inventories of foreclosed homes and buyers' continued difficulties securing financing in the wake of the mortgage crisis, said Anthony Sanders, a real estate finance professor at George Mason University.

"We are kind of locked in a corner where we don't really have a way out," he said. "Low interest rates aren't working."

The housing market could rebound by next summer if the economy improves dramatically, Sanders said. But recent economic indicators, from reports of manufacturing activity to measures of consumer confidence, have begun to dip again, a sign that the recovery could progress more slowly than expected.

The Conference Board's Consumer Confidence Index, for instance, fell to a surprising six-month low in May after improving the month before, as rising gas prices and inflated unemployment continue to weigh on consumers.

"Consumers are losing faith in an economic recovery right now," Sanders said. "You do not go out and buy a home if you believe that deflation is going to continue or ... you don't know if you'll even have a job."

A stunted economic recovery could prolong the housing market's turnaround until 2014 or 2015, he said.

The Case-Shiller data - which tracks repeat sales, making them a precise measure of home values - shows the Charlotte market performed better in March than some other metro areas, such as Minneapolis, where prices fell 10 percent from the previous year.

But the Charlotte region's price decline continues to outpace Case-Shiller's 20-market composite, which slid 3.6 percent from March 2010.

Weak home sales have contributed to the trend locally. The latest data from the Charlotte Regional Realtor Association show sales fell 16 percent in April from April 2010, when homebuyer tax credits were driving a surge in sales. Pending sales fell 25 percent from the previous year, the figures show.

The average selling price of a home in the Charlotte market in April was $203,428, up about 1 percent from the year before, the association's data shows. But that was down 8 percent from April 2008, just after the recession began.

"We have adjusted, if you will, to really a more fair market value," said Suzanne Coddington, a broker with Dickens Mitchener & Associates Inc. in Charlotte. "Things were out of hand, in my opinion, price-wise. We have adjusted, and many people have suffered during that adjustment period."

But while prices have decreased across the market, homes are still selling, particularly in pockets such as SouthPark and neighborhoods close to uptown, she said.

"I would say buyers are savvy - they do their homework - but they still are willing to buy in neighborhoods they see are appreciable," Coddington said. "They are buying, and they're buying at fair prices."

She acknowledges that that adjustment has been difficult for some would-be sellers, who have held off on plans to move in hopes that prices would edge closer to their pre-recession levels. After all, selling a home is an emotional decision, and it's difficult to let it go at a lower-than-expected price, even if the seller is buying another home at a similarly reduced price, Coddington said.

But consumers are already beginning to accept the change, she said, and she predicts many home buyers will get off the fence soon.

"Now we know the new market," she said. "People are deciding, 'You know what? I'm going to move on and just go on with my life.' I think people are ready to do that."