Case-Shiller: Los Angeles Home Prices Fell Again in November

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. – November data is released in January).

Here are the basic Case-Shiller stats for the Los Angeles area (which Case-Shiller defines as LA and Orange Counties) as of November:

Ninteen of the twenty metro areas tracked by Case-Shiller saw a decrease in their HPI between October and November (vs. 20 September to October). San Diego’s 0.1% increase was the only month-to-month gain. The same four markets as last month posted slight year-over-year gains: San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles, and Washington DC.

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:

The low tier has remained fairly flat over the last two months, giving the other two tiers some time to catch up. Month to month, the low tier was flat, the middle tier fell 0.7%, and the high tier decreased 0.3%.

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