Case-Shiller: Prices Begin Falling Again as Stimulus Wears Off

It’s time for our monthly check-in of the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices (HPI). Keep in mind that all of the charts in this series of posts are based on the seasonally-adjusted data provided by S&P. For the full source data behind this post, plus non-seasonally adjusted data, hit the S&P/Case-Shiller website (requires free registration). For an explanation of how the Case-Shiller data 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 Seattle area* as of November:

Fourteen of the twenty metro areas tracked by Case-Shiller saw an increase in their respective seasonally-adjusted HPIs between October and November (three more than October). Detroit, Washington, Miami, Tampa, Chicago, and New York all marked seasonally-adjusted drops month-to-month.

Here’s a look at Seattle’s latest tiered data, back through 2000:

The low tier and high tier both increased slightly (0.4% and 0.3% respectively, while the middle tier was perfectly flat.

Here’s a look at the seasonally-adjusted month-to-month figures in Redfin’s markets, with annotations of the beginning and the original end of the homebuyer tax credit, so you can see that I’m not just making stuff up when I say that the effects of the stimulus are wearing off.

Here’s a chart of Case-Shiller HPIs for all the markets that Redfin serves:

Here’s our peak decline chart, in which we line up the peak Case-Shiller HPI value for each of Redfin’s markets, so we can see how long each market has been declining, and how much it has dropped from the peak.

Here’s the flip side of the peak decline chart—a graph of just this year, indexed to January = 100%:

San Francisco, San Diego, and Los Angeles still appear to be on the rise, but elsewhere in the country, the summer 2009 price boost seems to have run out of steam.

*[Case-Shiller defines Seattle as the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA Metropolitan Statistical Area, which includes all of King, Pierce, and Snohomish counties.]