Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Corelogic: Colorado home prices fall 1.23 percent

Home prices in Colorado fell 1.23 percent from October 2010 to October 2011, continuing a downward trend in home prices in Colorado and nationwide. Nevertheless, the degree to which home prices have declined has lessened each month for the past seven months. According to the October Home Price Index (HPI), released today by CoreLogic, the year-over-year decline for Colorado was the smallest decline in 16 months, and the drop for the Denver area was also the smallest in 16 months. However, the trend in negative year-over-year changes continues and year-over-year changes have been negative for each month since July 2010.

Nationally, the index fell 3.90 percent, and it fell 0.4 percent in the Denver-Aurora-Broomfield metro area during the same period.

The first graph shows the year-over-year changes for the past 30 months in the US, Colorado and the Denver metro area. Over the past two years, the general trend in all three areas has been shaped by the home buyer tax credit, which was introduced in 2008 and expired in April 2010. Clearly, home prices climbed throughout the duration of the tax credit period, but have declined since the credit's expiration.



During most months in the past two years, the Colorado and metro Denver HPI have performed better (from a property owner's perspective) than the national HPI. The national HPI has declined more than the local HPIs in each month since September 2010.

This data for October suggests that, although the year-over-year declines have lessened in magnitude, home prices have not yet turned around in Colorado as of October 2011. Local Realtor data, as well as the Case-Shiller data, all show that in year-over-yea comparisons, home prices continue to fall when compared to the same month in the prior year. However, the Corelogic year-over-year changes are now close enough to zero to suggest that home prices are no longer declining, but are essentially flat in many markets.

New pending home sales data from NAR suggests some new strength in home sales transactions at the regional level in some areas, but in Colorado statewide, home sales activity through October remains about equal with 2009.

See the home price data archive for more.

Corelogic also provides one of the few publicly-available indices that looks at home prices in attached homes such as condos and townhomes. Among attached homes, home prices have fallen significantly more than is the case for all single-family properties. Although the combined single-family Colorado index fell by 1.2 percent, year-over-year for October, the same index for attached housing fell by 3.4 percent. In the metro Denver area, the index for attached homes fell 3.2 percent. As with the single-family combined index, the national rate of decline for attached homes was larger than the Colorado and Denver metro rates.



And finally, Corelogic provides a look at home prices with distressed properties excluded.

With distressed properties excluded, home prices actually increased from October 2010 to October 2011, with the Colorado index rising 0.1 percent year over year. During the same period, the national index fell 0.5 percent and the metro Denver index rose 1.2 percent.



The CoreLogic HPI is a three-month weighted average of August, September and October (with October weighted the most) and is not seasonally adjusted.