The New York Times article points out:
The report, released this month by John Burns Real Estate Consulting, an industry advisory firm based in California, showed that having a mortgage cost $839 more per month than having a lease — a difference nearly $200 higher than at any time in the past two decades. Just a year ago, the difference between owning and renting was virtually flat, according to the firm’s data.
The rest of the article is here.
Note that the NYT makes money only from the sell side (and therefore gets more info from the sell side), so it’s likely that the need for lowering house prices in order to make transactions happen is now pretty well recognized at the higher levels of RE+research firms.