Case-Shiller: Atlanta Home Prices Hit Another New Post-Peak Low
It’s time for our monthly check-in of the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices (HPI). The Case-Shiller data is generally considered to be the most reliable measure of overall home price changes for a region, since they only consider repeat sales of homes when calculating their index, instead of looking at all the homes that sold in a given month.
For the full source data behind this post, hit the S&P/Case-Shiller website. For a more detailed explanation of how the Case-Shiller Home Price Index is calculated, check out their methodology pdf. Also remember that the data released on the last Tuesday of a given month is for the period two months prior (i.e. – February data is released in April).
Here are the basic Case-Shiller stats for the Atlanta area* as of February:
Month to Month: Down 0.5%
Year to Year: Down 5.8%
Prices at this level in: November 1999
Peak month: July 2007
Change from Peak: Down 27.1% in 43 months
Low Tier: Under $121,751
Mid Tier: $121,751 to $223,180
Hi Tier: Over $223,180
Nineteen of the twenty metro areas tracked by Case-Shiller saw a decrease in their HPI between January and February (the same as December to January). Detroit of all places was the only city that saw a month-to-month gain (up 1.0%).
Here’s a look at the latest local tiered data, back through 2000:
And here’s a closer look at the recent changes, with the vertical and horizontal axes zoomed in to show just the last year:
While Atlanta’s middle and high tiers both fell in February, the low tier actually rose a bit. Month to month, the low tier was up 0.6%, the middle tier fell 0.3%, and the high tier decreased 0.7%.
