Case Shiller house price data for data up to June 2010 was just released. The numbers show nothing real surprising, and the basic trend of increasing home prices (compared to a year ago) appears to be continuing.
From June, 2009 to June, 2010, monthly home prices have increased 5.01%, whereas From May, 2009 to May, 2010, monthly home prices have increased 5.44%. (This latter number is slightly revised from a previous blog post.)
We have used the Case Shiller CSXR 10-city composite index in this analysis with non seasonally adjusted data.
The brief table below gives the 12-month home price percentage increases for the six months from January through June.
2010.00 -0.05
2010.08 1.46
2010.17 3.12
2010.25 4.60
2010.33 5.44
2010.42 5.01
In January home prices were still lower than they were a year ago, and since then they have shown increases compared to the same month of the previous year.
The year to year percentage increases are shown in the graph below.
There is a very slight downturn in home prices (i.e., in the home price increase rate - this can be very hard to understand), as seen at the very far right of the graph. It is probably too soon to know if this is a glitch or a real trend. The "glitch" at the right therefore shows a slight deceleration of home prices. Inspection of the graph shows that numerous "false glitches" do occur and the next few months will reveal whether this trend is real or a bump in the data. Of course the publishers of the index already know the answer since the data they release here is delayed by two months.