St. Louis Real Estate – St Louis area home price declines vs assessors property values

Dennis Norman

In an article this morning on StlToday.com I saw where property values, as determined by the St. Louis CountyAssessors office, declined 6.1 percent from 2007 to 2009.   Hmm, I thought, that sounds pretty good actually, I think the St. Louis housing market would be doing great if that was close to reality.  To see how the actual St. Louis housing market did during the same period I researched the sales prices of homes sold in the St. Louis metro area in 2007 and 2009 then computed the change in value during the period.

In fairness to St. Louis County as well as the other counties included, I should point out my little study is not entirely scientific nor exactly apples to apples.  My assumption is the numbers quoted in the article above for property value price changes include ALL property types in each county however the most accurate data I have available is for the residential market, so that is what I have taken into account.  I pulled data for the most common real estate we have in our area, single family homes.  Most analysts use “median” home prices when determining increases or decreases in value so I used median home prices as well.  However, I also used average home prices.  In both cases I took sales data for the entire year of 2007 to establish a value for 2007 and sales data from January 1, 2009 through September 30, 2000 to establish a value for 2009.

One last thought is, since the STLToday article looked at the total property value for each county, I would think new development would be skewing those numbers as if buildings were built on ground that was undeveloped in 2007 (not that that has happened a lot, but it has happened) that would increase the total value of the property for the county and skew the numbers.  Perhaps that is why there is such a huge gap in St Charles and Jefferson County between the sales data I’m showing and the change in property values the assessors office is showing.

In either event the data I have included here hopefully will help homeowners have an idea of where things stand with regard to the change in property values for their homes in the past two years.