With this week’s news that home prices fell 4.5 percent in the third quarter, a lot of people with real estate to sell have to make some tough decisions. Do they cut their asking price enough to get a contract, or do they hold out for the inevitable recovery?

The big question is, how long will they have to wait? Perhaps the best way to answer that question is to look at the last period in which home prices began to fall, as measured by the widely followed S&P/Case-Shiller index of home prices.

If the current slump follows the same pattern as in the 1990s, it could be a long wait. The chart shows the index from January 1990 to December 1997. As you can see, it took nearly seven years for the prices to recover and resume their upward climb from the 1990 levels.

The usual “past is not prologue” caveats apply, of course. But I don’t see a lot of reasons to think the current cycle will be any shorter or less painful than previous one, for several reasons:

• The disappearance of the subprime mortgage market has reduced the amount of money available for purchasing property.
• We’re in the early stages of a wave of foreclosures that will put more homes on the market, dragging down prices further.
• The current of homes is now at a 22-year high, and sales are down 31 percent from two years ago.

Either way, the sale price will likely be lower than it might have been last year, but it may well turn out to be higher than some of the prices ahead.