US Home Price Index Continues Climb

All signs continue to point to a recovery in the U.S. residential real estate market The summer 20-City Case Shiller Home Price Index shows that property prices increased in June and July. Standard & Poor’s reported that the adjusted numbers were not as impressive, but they were still positive. All 20 cities, which included hard-hit towns like Atlanta and Las Vegas, all showed average gains throughout the summer. The news is dampened somewhat due to the fact that banks are still keeping many distressed homes off the market to juice prices, but experts believe that sales and prices will continue to rise through 2012. For more on this continue reading the following article from Iacono Research. 

The nation’s housing market continued to rebound over the summer as Standard & Poor’s reported(.pdf) that the Case-Shiller 20-City Home Price Index rose 1.6 percent in July following a surge of 2.3 percent in June. The most respected measure of U.S. home prices now indicates a gain of 1.2 percent from a year ago.

On a seasonally adjusted basis, prices rose for the sixth straight month with the July gain at a less impressive 0.4 percent, after an increase of 0.9 percent the month prior, however, there is no mistaking the fact that home values are rising steadily this year after languishing for nearly two years following the initial rebound from the 2008 financial crisis and the myriad of home buyer incentives from the U.S. government.

 All 20 cities showed gains in July, paced by surges of 3.7 percent in Minneapolis and 3.3 percent in Detroit. Even Atlanta home prices are on a tear as June’s 4.4 percent jump was followed by a 2.6 percent advance in July. On a year-over-year basis, Atlanta is still the clear laggard at -9.9 percent, along with Chicago, Las Vegas, and New York one of only four cities where prices are lower than a year ago and one-time housing basket case Phoenix leads all cities with home price gains of 16.6 percent over last year.

Of course, recent gains are due in part to limited housing inventory as banks continue to hold distressed properties off the market and move slowly on new foreclosures at the same time that mortgage rates have become freakishly low, setting new records just about every day in the wake of the Federal Reserve’s latest money printing extravaganza in which they’ll buy $40+ billion in mortgage backed securities each month.

Don’t you just love it when a good asset re-flation plan comes together?

This blog post was republished with permission from Tim Iacono.

Hope for Housing Comeback

Economist Richard Greene is taking an optimistic tack regarding his latest forecast for the beleaguered U.S. housing market. He points to the latest Case-Shiller report as a harbinger of good things to come, noting that housing inventories are low compared to historical standards, prices are lower than ever, and the Home Affordable Refinance Program can now accelerate amortization. For more on this continue reading the following article from Economist’s View. 

Richard Green makes a prediction:

Maybe I am too eager to believe it, and...: ..I expect to be smote down for saying it, but I think the two month old, mediocre, Case-Shiller number that came out today is consistent with the idea that the housing market will really come back big this year (I said so in the paper and on the radio today, so I might as well say it here).

Inventories in many hard hit markets are now low by historical standards. Time on market has fallen. HARP II can accelerate amortization (which is its most important feature). Prices are really cheap, both when the user cost they produce is compared with rent, and when compared with incomes (by World standards).

 This blog post was republished with permission from Economist's View.

A Closer Look At Home Price Increases

Is the Case-Shiller Home Price Index a good representation of actual home prices? The following post from The Mess That Greenspan Made, explains some of the possible flaws in the calculation of the index and why we should take the numbers with a grain of salt. Continue reading to learn more.

Mark Hanson's comments on the recent upswing in real estate prices as indicated by the highly regarded S&P Case-Shiller Home Price Indexes. It seems that, almost every few months now, there's a new wrinkle in how home price changes are reported and, coming as it does amid what millions of people think is a bottom for home prices, this one's a doozy.

Mid-to-High End Sales – Very Important.
Not Representative of True Market

More mid-to-high end sales are occurring this year than last. They are not anywhere close to the bubble years due to the catastrophic loss of affordability through exotic finance but they have increased as prices fell. They are occurring at significant discounts to list prices and previous year’s sales as I have highlighted many times. At the same time, foreclosure-related resales are falling as demand from first-timers and investors who have carried the market for a year has peaked.

This seasonal mix-shift is almost exclusively responsible for the significant house price appreciation in any CA MSA’s over the past 90-days. Mid-to-high end sellers and buyers are the most seasonal of all. As soon as the summer warm months are over and kids are back to school these sales will drop considerably allowing foreclosure resales, which are not seasonal, to reclaim this mix. This will drop reported median and average house prices as early as September, which will be reported in October.

Here's the interesting part.

At this point, you might be thinking that Mr. Hanson has the calculation of median prices confused with the paired-sales methodology used by Case-Shiller, but he does not.

While I haven't read the details of how the index is calculated recently, one can immediately understand how the index values can be affected by how long the seller has owned the home after reading the following:

Who is the Mid-to-High end Seller? Why Is This Important?

Now, think about those that are selling these mid-to-high priced houses. It is not the person who bought from 2005-2007 on a Pay Option ARM with 5% down because they can’t sell. It is the person who bought years ago that has enough equity to dump the price, sell, and have enough left over for the down payment on the house they plan to steal in the desert.

Even with the price dump, a person who bought in 1999 for $450k — who saw their house price rise to $1.5 million by 2007 and subsequently drop to $700k — realizes a price gain and so does CS. Even though CS reduces the weighting of pair sales the longer ago they occurred — when this is all you have selling — it carries most of the weight.

The bottom line is that Case-Shiller reports what sold, period. It is my opinion that the real estate market is so thin and bifurcated that what is selling today is not representative of the true real estate market.

It likely is not accurately representing properties purchased during the bubble years that are now worth a fraction of their purchase price because they are not transacting.

This is apparently part of a private letter to clients. If anyone has a copy and would like to share some more details, please feel free to do so in the comments section or via email.

Maybe, I'll drop Mark a line and ask him if he would like to share any more details about this because my interest is piqued. Then again, I haven't checked Calculated Risk yet today and Bill might already have an analysis on this subject posted.

Anyway, this all makes a good deal of sense to me - aside from a few price ranges in a few areas of the country that may have hit bottom, there is much more work to do to get home prices back to more normal levels - and then there's the typical "overshoot".

This post has been republished from Tim Iacono's blog, The Mess That Greenspan Made.