It’s been over three years since the first signs of trouble began emerging in the U.S. housing and real estate market. Standard & Poor’s just released the latest Case-Shiller Home Price data so where do we stand now? Market pundits have been cheering the percentage price gains in the Case-Shiller Home Price Index for several months and telling bearish investors to forget the past and go right back to the same assumptions that caused the real estate crises in the first place. To support their theory, they simply point to charts like the one below.
Case-Shiller Percentage Year over Year Price Change Index
Unfortunately, the above chart gives a very skewed picture of what is actually happening to U.S. home prices because we are coming off of such a low base. To account for this statistical anomaly, I prefer to look at what actual prices are doing with the chart below.
Case-Shiller Home Price Index
Looking at the first chart would leave you to believe that you’re about to “miss” the next boom in real estate but using the second chart for added context will surely give you pause. The U.S. Government began inflating the housing bubble all the way back in the 1980’s with aggressive home-ownership policies spearheaded by Fannie Mae, Ginnie Mae and Freddie Mac. Wall St. helped the bubble along with financial “engineering” and then the Federal Reserve even stepped in to do its’ part after the dot-com crash by lowering rates dramatically for an unprecedentedly long period of time.
All these factors make it very hard to get a real idea of what housing prices should be because the markets have been manipulated so completely. For a best guess, we can look back to where prices bottomed in the 1990’s or we can look at metrics such as income to home price ratios. Unfortunately, no matter what you look at (aside from the housing bulls’ percentage price change chart), things do not look pretty. The 1990’s levels leave us with a long way to fall and inflation-adjusted median income has fallen.
Let’s just hope that I’m wrong and the housing bulls are right…
-MJB
Lucid Markets 
How’s the Housing Market Doing? – Depends on What Data You Look At
It’s been over three years since the first signs of trouble began emerging in the U.S. housing and real estate market. Standard & Poor’s just released the latest Case-Shiller Home Price data so where do we stand now? Market pundits have been cheering the percentage price gains in the Case-Shiller Home Price Index for several months and telling bearish investors to forget the past and go right back to the same assumptions that caused the real estate crises in the first place. To support their theory, they simply point to charts like the one below.
Case-Shiller Percentage Year over Year Price Change Index
Unfortunately, the above chart gives a very skewed picture of what is actually happening to U.S. home prices because we are coming off of such a low base. To account for this statistical anomaly, I prefer to look at what actual prices are doing with the chart below.
Case-Shiller Home Price Index
Looking at the first chart would leave you to believe that you’re about to “miss” the next boom in real estate but using the second chart for added context will surely give you pause. The U.S. Government began inflating the housing bubble all the way back in the 1980’s with aggressive home-ownership policies spearheaded by Fannie Mae, Ginnie Mae and Freddie Mac. Wall St. helped the bubble along with financial “engineering” and then the Federal Reserve even stepped in to do its’ part after the dot-com crash by lowering rates dramatically for an unprecedentedly long period of time.
All these factors make it very hard to get a real idea of what housing prices should be because the markets have been manipulated so completely. For a best guess, we can look back to where prices bottomed in the 1990’s or we can look at metrics such as income to home price ratios. Unfortunately, no matter what you look at (aside from the housing bulls’ percentage price change chart), things do not look pretty. The 1990’s levels leave us with a long way to fall and inflation-adjusted median income has fallen.
Let’s just hope that I’m wrong and the housing bulls are right…
-MJB