It’s Official: Denver was the strongest housing market in 2008 according to the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices
Tuesday, 24 February 2009 by Dave
As we’ve discussed here previously, Denver has weathered the storm of the economic crisis/recession/overall panic reasonably well all things considered. Now we have proof.
Per the Denver Business Journal:
Prices of existing homes declined less through 2008 in the Denver area than in any of 20 major U.S. cities, Standard & Poor’s reported Tuesday.
The monthly S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices said average prices of existing homes in Denver fell 4 percent between December 2007 and December 2008, less than any of the other 19 cities in the report.
The average decline among the 20 cities was 18.5 percent, S&P said.
Among the 20 cities covered in the Home Price Indices report, Dallas had the second smallest year-to-year housing-price decline after Denver, at 4.3 percent, followed by Cleveland at 6.1 percent and Boston at 7 percent.
The cities with the greatest price declines were Phoenix at 34 percent, Las Vegas at 33 percent and San Francisco at 31.2 percent, S&P said.
The survey also indicated that Denver had the second-smallest decline in existing-house prices between November and December 2008, at 1.5 percent, behind only Boston at 1.3 percent. Denver’s decline between October and November 2008 was 1.1 percent.
Phoenix had the greatest month-to-month decline from November to December, 5.1 percent, followed by Las Vegas at 4.8 percent and Minneapolis at 4.6 percent, S&P said.
Nationwide, the S&P report painted a gloomy picture of steadily declining home prices.
“The broad downturn in the residential real estate market continues,” David Blitzer, chairman of S&P’s index committee, said in a statement Tuesday. “There are very few, if any, pockets of turnaround that one can see in the data. Most of the nation appears to remain on a downward path.”
The survey tracks changes in the value of the residential real estate market by comparing sale prices of specific sample homes in a city at two different times. Calculations are by Fiserv, Inc. using methodology developed by Karl Case and Robert Shiller.
The survey assigns an index number to each city and does not report actual home prices. The index is a measure of how much home prices have gone up or down in each market since January 2000, which has been assigned a price index of 100 in that market.
The report said Denver had a home-price index of 125.74 in December, meaning home prices have gone up 25.74 percent since January 2000. Home prices in Denver peaked in August 2006.
Six of the 20 cities had a lower price index than Denver, with Detroit at the bottom at 80.93. New York topped the list at 183.50.
The average price index for all 20 cities of 150.66.
As we posted last week, Northwest Denver has actually been rising in average sales price for 3 consecutive months. DNW is now above it’s August 2008 peak for average sales price and our personal experience as of late has been that both buyers and sellers are getting back into the game. Only time will tell but we’re feeling as though we may have seen the worst of things here in our neck of the woods.
A PDF summarizing the data for this past month’s report can be found here.
