People want to know about homes prices going up or down, but it’s difficult to measure. Because of the diversity of homes selling in different areas, there isn’t one clear, concise tool to judge the general pricing trends, so try to take a little from each.
CoreLogic does an index of repeat sales that is similar to the Case-Shiller Index.
Here is the history of their Monthly HPI over the last 24 months for San Diego:
The graph below shows how the distressed sales impact these repeat-sale indicies.
While we have seen plenty of long-time owners get foreclosed due to serial refinancing, most distressed sales are homes that were purchased around the peak of the market. With those, the second sale in the repeat set is naturally much lower than the non-distressed sets – that’s why the homeowners bailed out!
When you take out the distressed sales, there is a somewhat-narrow band of +/- 5% for non-distressed pricing since October, 2009.
If the lenders/servicers continue to throttle the sales of distressed homes, we can probably expect the overall inventory to be thin, and non-distressed pricing to be in this same range.
Strip away the headlines with their fear based sensationalism and this is what you get. Sober information, and, nobody comments. Best data on the web but nobody will believe you.
It’s not sexy enough.
It reminds me of the NBA finals. While it’s sexy to hate on Lebron, etc., Dallas is just a good team.