Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Ofheo House Price Index Flattens

See http://www.ofheo.gov/media/pdf/2q06hpi.pdf. House prices rose only 1.17 percent in the second quarter, according to the index. This is an increase that more or less keeps pace with inflation.

The Ofheo house price index is not, however, completely representative of the housing market. Ofheo tracks prices on houses financed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; Fannie and Freddie may only finance "conforming" loans, which are in 2006 defined as loans whose value is less than 417,000. This limit shuts Fannie and Freddie off from large parts of the California, Boston, New York and Washington housing markets; consequently, should these large markets go into the tank, their impact on the index will be muted.

The Case, Shiller, Weiss (http://www2.standardandpoors.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=sp/Page/PressSpecialCoveragePg&c=sp_speccoverage&cid=1143857726920&r=1&l=EN&b=4index ) doesn't have this issue; nor, presumably, do the indexes that one can find in Zillow. The CSW Composite Index for 10 cities was completely flat in June.

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