George Schils Business Blog - BZ Bread

Case Shiller (part of Standard and Poors) provides nice housing data. Case Shiller home price index reports are found here. This pdf document has some nice graphs of recent housing price trends.

The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight offers an interesting and alternative set of housing data.

This report contains a number of analysis which show an increase in house prices from December to January.

The latest Case Shiller home price index shows a slowing of the rate of decrease of home prices. Up until this month the rate of decrease has been increasing, and just this month, the rate of decrease has started to slow.

Year to year percentage increases from Feb, 2008 through Feb. 2009 is given in the short table below.

-13.54 Feb, 2008
-15.27
-16.25
-16.85
-16.95
-17.4
-17.67
-18.51
-19.11
-19.14
-19.21
-19.43
-18.84 Feb, 2009

Home price values are still decreasing but this change in the sign of the derivative of the derivative may be an encouraging sign. But it's too soon to know for sure if this is a true inflexion point or just a glitch in the data.

The last time a positive second derivative occurred was in Nov., 2005.

The second derivative could be called the "price acceleration". Just because you have lightly touched the brakes in a car, it does not mean that you are not going fast. Or, just because you touched the accelerator while going slowly does not mean that your speed is high. The point where you move your foot from the brake to the gas pedal (or vice versa) is an "inflection point", and it does not indicate your speed, but is still an important point to note.

The Case Shiller "composite-10" index was used in this analysis.

The median price of a home as reflected by the Bloomberg index is on the rise.

Home prices increased by 1.4% from May to June 2009, according to recent Case Shiller data.

Here we use the CSXR 10 city index. This index showed a month to month percentage increase in home prices of 1.40%, and that the year to year increase was -15.13% (from June 2008 to June 2009).

The graph below shows the percentage month to month changes in the CSXR index. These are monthly percentages and are not annualized. It seems clear that home prices are on the increase again. A respectable increase is seen at the right side of the graph.

The 1.4% monthly increase translates to a very high yearly percentage. The real interesting question is what next month's data will show.

Home prices increased by 1.65% from June 2009 to July 2009, according to recent Case Shiller data.

The table below shows detailed data for the last seven months. The second column is the increase percentage for the same month one year ago. Column 4 is the monthly percentage increase. A new calculation is column 3, which is a kind of second derivative of the CSXR value - this is the home price acceleration. This is calculated as the difference between the yearly home price increases: the July 2009 acceleration is calculated as -15.07 - -12.77 = 2.30. In other words, the numbers for the year to year increases although still negative are increasing at an increasing rate.

January 2009    -19.44  -0.21   -2.55
February 2009   -18.88  0.55    -2.12
March 2009      -18.62  0.26    -2.04
April 2009      -17.96  0.66    -0.68
May 2009        -16.76  1.20    0.47
June 2009       -15.07  1.69    1.45
July 2009       -12.77  2.30    1.65

These numbers are for the CSXR 10-city index. Most media reports are for the 20-city index, so the results here are an interesting companion to other popular media reports.

From column 3 it is clear that home prices have accelerated for six months straight, and the acceleration is increasing.

Home prices are still lower than they were a year ago (by 12.8%) but at the same time home prices are accelerating.

Case Shiller has stopped publishing its data in spreadsheet format. This means that I am going to stop publishing the kinds of studies that I have been doing in the past.

If I can locate spreadsheet data, I may continue to do this analysis in the future.

Case Shiller housing data is found at this link.

Case Shiller had stopped publishing its data in spreadsheet format. Or at least I was not able to locate their data in this format. I recently noticed that their data seems to be available in spread sheet format again, so I have resumed doing house price analysis. The analysis here is very similar to what I have been doing in the past but the data has been updated.

The graph below shows the percentage increases in home prices from year to year. That is, this is a 12 month price percentage change.

From March, 2009 to March, 2010, home prices have increased 3.15%. This is the right most point in the graph above. We have used the Case Shiller CSXR 10-city composite index in this analysis.

The graph below shows the percentage increases in home prices from year to year. That is, this is a 12 month price percentage change.

From April, 2009 to April, 2010, home prices have increased 4.61%. This is the right most point in the graph above. The 12 month percentage gains appear to be increasing since the number for last month (March) was 3.14%. We have used the Case Shiller CSXR 10-city composite index in this analysis with non seasonally adjusted data.

Case Shiller house price data for data up to May 2010 was just released. The numbers show nothing surprising, and the past trend of once again increasing home prices appears to be continuing nicely. House prices have increased compared to their prices a year ago.

From May, 2009 to May, 2010, monthly home prices have increased 5.40%, whereas From April, 2009 to April, 2010, monthly home prices have increased 4.63%. (This latter number is slightly revised from a previous blog post.)

The 12 month percentage gains appear to be increasing since the number for last month (March) was 3.14%.

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.

January 2010    -0.05
February 2010   1.45
March 2010      3.14
April 2010      4.63
May 2010        5.40

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.

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.

A plot of home prices using Case Shiller data is shown in the graphic below.

This plot is of the 10 city csxr index over a time period from about 1987. The right side of the graph shows that the home prices have been somewhat wobbling over the last several years. It's not great news; but it's also not bad news.

The short table below gives some numerical values. Column 1 is the year, column 2 is the 10 city csxr index value, and column 3 is the year to year (12 month) percentage increase.

2012.00 148.00  -4.12
2012.08 146.64  -3.77
2012.17 146.46  -2.95
2012.25 148.45  -2.19
2012.33 151.75  -1.03
2012.42 154.97  0.06
2012.50 157.24  0.58
2012.58 158.54  1.30
2012.67 158.87  2.09
2012.75 158.77  3.41

It is seen that the October 2012 csxr value of 159 is 3.41% higher than the value one year ago.