Reports Continue to Show Home Price Declines

CoreLogic and Lender Processing Services (LPS) have each released their most recent Home Price Indices.  CoreLogic's HPI covers December; LPS's covers the month of November.  Here is a quick review of each.

LPS found that the average home price for transactions during November was $199.000, down 0.6 percent from the October average.  This is the fifth consecutive month that this index has declined.  Preliminary information on December sales indicates that the HPI might have lost another 0.8 percent during that month.

When the market peaked in June 2006 the total value of the U.S. housing inventory covered by LPS was $10.8 trillion.  The value has declined 30.6 percent to $7.5 trillion since that time.

Price changes were consistent across the country, increasing in 13 percent of the ZIP Codes in the database.  Higher priced homes had somewhat small price declines than those in the middle and low price categories with the range from high to low covering only 13 basis points.

CoreLogic issues two sets of indices, one including sales of distressed properties, the other excluding those sales.  The HPI for all sales decreased 1.4 percent in December and was down 4.7 percent on an annual basis, the fifth year in a row that this HPI has declined.    The Index covering market sales was 0.9 percent higher than in December 2010 which, Core Logic says, gives an indication of the impact distressed sales are having on the market.  The HPI excluding distressed sales posted its first month -over-month gain since last July, rising 0.2 percent. 

Of the top 100 Core Based Statistical Areas as measured by population, 81 showed year-over-year declines in November compared to 80 that were down on a monthly basis in November compared to October.