National Home Prices Show Little Change in Two Indices

BY JANN SWANSON, Mortgage Daily News, Jan 10 2012

Two reports on U.S. home prices were released on Monday.  The two, the CoreLogic Home Price Index (HPI) and the Clear Capital Home Data Index (HDI) cover different time periods and use somewhat different methodology so the data is not comparable between the two.  Here is a brief summary of each.

CoreLogic, using a repeat sales index, reports that prices in the U.S. decreased 1.4 percent in November compared to October, the fourth consecutive monthly decline.  On a year-over-year basis prices, including distressed sales, were down by 4.3 percent.  This follows a -3.7 percent change in October 2011 compared to October 2010.  When distressed sales are eliminated, year-over-year sales were down 0.6 percent in November following a drop of 1.6 percent in October.

Mark Fleming, chief economist for CoreLogic said “With one month of data left to report, it appears that the healthy, non-distressed market will be very modestly down in 2011.  Distressed sales continue to put downward pressure on prices, and are a factor that must be addressed in 2012 for a housing recovery to become a reality.”

Clear Capital reports on both December activity and provides an end of year summary.  It generates its indices in rolling quarter intervals that compare the most recent four months to the previous three months and includes unweighted data on both fair market sales and sales of owned real estate (REO).

U.S. prices declined 0.4 percent in December, giving back some of the year’s earlier gains   Clear Capital says this is the first “cooling off” following six months of modest gains.  During that period (June-December) prices were almost flat at -0.1 percent.

———————————————————————————————————————————–

Seems to be further evidence that the housing depression is coming to an end.  local anecdotal evidence leads me to believe the

Image by Gerard Stolk vers la Chandeleur via Flickr

upswing is starting NOW!  Welcome 2012.