Tuesday, March 27, 2012

U.S. home prices continue slide but Charlotte data is missing from this month's data

US. home prices continued their decline in January, reflecting how prices are still under pressure, according to a report released Tuesday.

Data for Charlotte-area home prices, however, was excluded from the report because it wasn’t available.

The Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller Home Price Index, which measures home prices in 20 cities, fell 3.8 percent in January compared to a year ago.

S&P’s David Blitzer said in a statement that the group did not calculate a January index for Charlotte because of delays in reporting for Mecklenburg County.

“We are not sure of the reasons for the delays, but we do expect to see data in next month’s release,” said Blitzer, chairman of the index committee at S&P Indices. Charlotte-area prices in December were down 2 percent from November and 2.3 percent from December 2010, according to the index, which tracks repeat sales.

Sixteen of the 19 cities included in the January index saw prices decline on a monthly basis, an improvement over December, where 19 of 20 cities saw decreases. On an annual basis, Miami, Phoenix and Washington saw gains. Atlanta continues to suffer the most, posting the lowest average return of -14.8 percent.

The housing market has shown promising signs, according to a report by the National Association of Realtors. The group said its Pending Home Sales Index, based on contracts signed in January, increased 2 percent to 97.0 - the highest reading since April 2010. The Case-Shiller Home Price Index is a lagging indicator.

Economists and local real estate experts say they think area home prices will continue to fall this year in part because the market must cope with a large supply of available houses, including distressed ones.

Additional pressure also comes from a looming shadow inventory that could hit the market. Shadow inventory includes homes that are in the foreclosure process, likely to enter the foreclosure process or owned by banks but not on the market. These homes are not included in official inventory statistics.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Poor Atlanta.

Anonymous said...

If you don't have a consistent data set, you aren't comparing apples to apples, and thus you don't have a reliable index.

They're about as good at this as they were at evaluating and rating all the paper on the market for the past 10 years. It's amazing how many AAA rated securities, according to S&P, turned out to be complete garbage.

As a ratings agency, they carry a lot of responsibility, and they don't seem to much care.

sell my house said...

Economics and local real state experts told the right thing.according to this report experts should take a right step .sell my house