San Diego’s Case-Shiller Index just barely continued its positive (but very thin) winning streak, rising for the fourth month in a row – though still lower than it was a year ago:
| Month | Seas-Adj. | Chg. | Non-SA | Chg. |
| May 12 | ||||
| Apr 12 | +0.3% | +0.8% M-O-M | ||
| May 11 | -1.1% | -1.1% Y-O-Y |
From cnnmoney.com:
All 20 cities in the index posted positive returns, led by Chicago, where prices rose a whopping 4.5% month-over-month. In Atlanta, where prices dropped 17% over the 12 months ended in April, turned that around in May with an increase of 4%.
Other big winners were San Francisco, up 3.9%, and Minneapolis, where prices rose 3%. The smallest gain was recorded by Detroit, where prices inched up 0.4%. Phoenix posted the best annual return by far, up 11.5%.
“Investor money has come in to some of the hard-hit markets like Phoenix and Florida cities,” said Mike Larson, a real estate analyst with Weiss Research. That has helped stabilize housing by shrinking inventory.
An ongoing change in the mix of homes sold may be contributing to improving prices, according to Stan Humphries, chief economist for real estate website Zillow. Fewer homes are going as foreclosures, which banks discount heavily to move quickly.
Short sales are claiming a bigger market share, according to David Crowe, chief economist for the National Association of Home Builders. They’re often in better condition than foreclosures and the selling process plays out more like conventional sales. Prices, as a result, are higher for short sales.
(Though neither of the quotes in the two highlighted paragraphs apply to C-S data)
No matter how you cast it, that’s one pathetic chart. Hope is not a strategy. If our handlers, the Masters-of-the-Universe, so-called had allowed the market do what it should do, we would have been along our way to recovery long ago.