In a nutshell, the story goes like this:

Home sales rose in the St. Louis area are from January to February this year. Meanwhile, year-over-year, February home sales prices are really down.

This suggests people who couldn’t sell their homes cut their prices a lot to get rid of them.

We’ll have more details in the story for Tuesday’s Post-Dispatch. The trend is reflected in national numbers, according to this story by the Associated Press.

Prices continued to slide. The median sales price for single-family homes homes and condomiums dropped to $195,900, a fall of 8.2 percent from a year ago, the biggest slide in the current housing slump. The median price for just single-family homes was down 8.7 percent from a year ago, the biggest decline in four decades.

Know anybody in this category — someone who wanted to sell and finally had to chop the price down? What’s it mean for your home or neighborhood? For the economy? Are home prices something you worry about — or only worry about when you’re ready to buy or sell?