Whether or not the housing market is on a road to recovery is still too tough to call. (Photo: iStockphoto)
Standard and Poor’s released its Case-Shiller home price indices yesterday, and while the data shows home-price declines across most markets, I can’t help calling the newly released data “positive.”
Standard and Poor’s notes that while prices are still heading downward, S&P’s two composite indices (one measures prices across 20 U.S. cities, while the other measures prices across 10 U.S. cities) are showing slower rates of price decline, with November’s data showing the 10th straight month of “improved readings in the annual statistics, beginning in early 2009, and is the third consecutive month these statistics have registered single digit declines, after 20 consecutive months of double digit declines,” S&P reports.
In today’s tough economic times, even prices that are falling – but at slower rates – can be something to be hopeful about. (But it's definitely not time to break out the champagne – the housing market shows “no clear sign of a sustained, broad-based recovery," according to David M. Blitzer, chairman of the index committee at Standard & Poor's.
The 10-city composite home-price index had a price decline of 4.5 percent in November from November 2008, while the 20-city home-price composite price index showed a decline of 5.3 percent from a year before.
While prices were lower in 16 out of 20 cities from November 2008, they were actually higher in four cities: Dallas, San Francisco, Denver and San Diego. Home prices are now at about the same level as they were in late 2003, according to S&P. For a city-by-city look at the Case-Shiller data, view the report.—Lauren Baier Kim