WSJ: Tracking Housing Prices

Tracking Housing Prices – Why the Numbers Conflict, By David Wessel, The Wall Street Journal Online.

  • “Predicting how much worse the U.S. housing market will get is tough. The future is never certain. But when it comes to home prices, getting a clear picture of the recent past turns out to be surprisingly hard as well…Tracking home prices is harder than tracking the price of stocks, which are traded constantly in public view on exchanges. And it’s harder than tracking the price of toothpaste. That just involves sampling posted prices on grocery-store shelves and Web sites. The two best — though far from perfect — measures of housing prices are the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight‘s index and the gloomier Standard & Poor’s Case/Shiller index. Both are based on a concept, developed in the 1980s by Karl Case of Wellesley College and Robert Shiller of Yale University, that looks at repeat sales of the same houses.”
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