The Federal Housing Finance Agency released its housing data for all parts of the country on Tuesday: "Our latest data are consistent with growing evidence that housing market conditions may be stabilizing in some part of the country,'' FHFA Director James Lockhart said in the news release. He said future numbers may be brighter as people are able to take advantage of new stimulus programs, including a tax credit for first-time home buyers. Still, Flagstaff housing numbers from this agency show an over 7% decline from the first quarter of 2008 through the first quarter of 2009. The Federal Housing Finance Agency, formerly known as the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, tracks only repeat sales of the same houses.
Another index, using a similar methodology to the FHFA system, is the Case-Schiller index, which is widely followed by Wall Street investors. Case-Schiller is further limited by the fact that the Case-Schiller methodology excludes homes that have had improvements in an attempt to account for the fact that the new buyer is purchasing a home that is really different from the home that the seller purchased. By this exclusion, however, the index eliminates the relatively attractive homes and limits its measurement to what are generally called "outdated homes." This methodology becomes statistically insignificant in a smaller market like Flagstaff, which is why the index tracks only 20 major cities, not including Flagstaff, AZ.
In contrast to the former two indices, both of which reported data on Tuesday, the National Association of Realtors® monthly report on home sales compiles data from multiple-listing-services throughout the country. NAR data runs a month ahead of the statistics from the other two indices. Thus, NAR’s news release on Tuesday reported April home sales results while the other two releases covered data ending in March 2009. The Realtor® data tends to focus on volume of sales rather than median prices since prices vary so much from local market to local market. NAR’s spokesperson said, “Most of the sales are taking place in lower price ranges and activity is beginning to pick up in the mid-price ranges, but high-end home sales remain sluggish.” For April home sales in Flagstaff as reported in our multiple-listing-service, visit my earlier posts:
Monthly Flagstaff Home Sales Report -- April 2009
Monthly Flagstaff Townhome and Condo Report -- April 2009 |
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