Breaking down the different home price index reports - part one
I am going to discuss the different home price index reports for real estate. A home price index report measures the price of houses. The four reports I am going to discuss are The S&P Case Shiller, OFHEO’s (Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight), Radar Logic and what I’ll call the local report based on data for the Cecil County real estate market and Harford County real estate market furnished by my mls (multiple list service). I think this is an important thing to discuss now, due to all of the doom and gloom surrounding the Cecil County real estate market and Harford County real estate market currently. It seems I can not even turn on my tv without hearing something negative about the real estate market. I wonder why consumer confidence keeps falling? If they say the sky is falling it must be, right?
Let me first say that Real Estate is a very localized market. What happens in the Cecil County real estate market and the Harford County real estate market may not be happening in your market and vice versa.
I am going to start with the S&P Case Shiller home price index because it seems to be the most publicized report in my opinion. They do a 10 city report, a 20 city report and a national report. The data they use are repeat sales for single family homes. There has to be two or more recorded sales for the property and they exclude condos and co ops. There data goes back to January, 1987. The S&P Case Shiller report is calculated monthly and published with a two month lag. There national report is calculated quarterly. They also do a year end report. The S&P Case Shiller year end report came out on February 26th and that is the one I am going to discuss.
The chart above is found at S&P/Case-Shiller ® Home Price Indices and depicts the annual returns of the U.S. National Home Price, the ten City Composite and the twenty City Composite Indices.
Here are there year end change percentages.
National -8.9%
Atlanta -3.4%
Boston -3.4%
Charlotte +2.3%
Chicago -4.5%
Cleveland -6.3%
Dallas -2.4%
Denver -4.5%
Detroit -13.6%
Las Vegas -15.3%
Los Angeles -13.7%
Miami -17.5%
Minneapolis -8.0%
New York -5.6%
Phoenix -15.3%
Portland +1.2%
San Diego -15.0%
San Francisco -10.8%
Seattle +0.5%
Tampa -13.3%
Washington -9.4%
Composite-10 -9.8%
Composite-20 -9.1%
That’s great, but here in the Cecil County real estate market we are a rural area and not close to any of the cities they report on. I don’t see how this report pertains to the Cecil County real estate market or the Harford County real estat market. If they at least included Baltimore it could be somewhat relevant but it does not. The headlines are already eating this up and reporting on how terrible the housing market is. I’m not saying that the Cecil County real estate market or the Harford County real estate market is great or even close to being great. What I’m saying is this report tells me nothing about how the Cecil County real estate market is doing. There are markets that are not doing as horrible as the media would lead you to believe and the point of this post is too go over each of these reports and let you decide which pertains to your market the best. Then you can make an informed decision about how bad or good your market is doing.
My next blog post will discuss the OFHEO.
Filed under: Market Statistics on March 3rd, 2008
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