Home prices [Index, Windex, Zindex]
There is as much confusion about home prices today as there are indexes that attempt to measure the value of homes either nationally or locally. Of course, windex is not an index but it is used in the home to clean the windows, etc., which of course would tend to increase the value of your home.
Carl Bialik writing in the Wall Street Journal says
"The one point of widespread agreement in the real-estate industry is that there is no single accurate index of home prices. They are all over the map, cover different sets of homes and may exclude parts of the country or be unduly influenced by the mix of homes sold in a given month." Read more.
Take a look at 6 different indexes courtesy of WSJ Online.
I have often said that the median sales price is flawed. Stan Humphries, VP of Data and Analytics at Zillow describes exactly why.
"What does this all mean? In short, the median sale price is generally not a very reliable indicator of home value changes over time. The reason for this shortcoming is that it conflates two independent characteristics of the housing stock – changes in home values and changes in the mix of homes sold – when we really only want to measure one characteristic – changes in home values." Read more.
And you know he must be very smart because I have no idea what the word conflates means and Zillow has put together a very impressive set of statistics for home prices across the country and in your neighborhood. And because Zillow enjoys making up words like zestimate, they have introduced their zindex.
According to Zillow, home prices in the Charleston area declined by 2.5% from the previous quarter and 5.2% over the past year. Most interesting is the sharper decline in the top tier homes than in either the bottom or middle tier. Five year and ten year appreciation in the Charleston real estate market has been 4.9% and 7.3% annually.
More detailed information in an excel spreadsheet including a summary, glossary and statistics by city and zip code are available through this link to Zillow.