Agent Insights: Always Uncensored, Now Out of the Shadows

In case you missed it, we made a bunch of improvements to our site recently, and we wanted to put the spotlight one of the most exciting:  Ventura County home buyers now have uninhibited and uncensored access to information that no other site has.

Agent Insights are those short observations that our agents leave on Redfin.com after personally walking through a property. Now these insights are right where they should be: Staring back at you from the right-hand side of the mapped results page, and not behind an “Email me this Insight” button.

When you visit Redfin.com, you’re getting all the information that’s available about the home. Not just the numbers, but a Redfin agent’s no-holds-barred thoughts on the place. And we think that’s pretty cool.

Case-Shiller: Another Winter for Home Prices

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:

Nineteen of the twenty metro areas tracked by Case-Shiller saw a decrease in their HPI between October and November (the same as between September and October): Only Phoenix saw an increase, for the second month in a row. This month Chicago bumped Atlanta out of the bottom spot, falling 3.4% in a single month.

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:

All three of LA’s tiers fell in November. Month to month, the low tier was down 0.2%, the middle tier fell 0.3%, and the high tier decreased 1.4%.

In this next chart, I’ve visualized the month to month trends of all twenty Case-Shiller-tracked cities. Green and above the horizontal axis if they were increasing in the month charted, red and below the axis if they were decreasing. I’ve excluded 2000 through 2004 since they looked largely the same as 2005 (mostly green).

Just five months ago, all twenty cities saw month to month gains. Now just one is not the red.

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