- Dennis Norman
According to a report issued by First American CoreLogic national home price declines continue to improve citing that national housing prices fell 7.8 percent in June 2009 compared to June 2008 representing the small est year-over-year decline recorded to date in 2009. This was a 0.7 percent improvement over Mays decline of 8.5% from the prior year.
St. Louis did not fare quite as well in the CoreLogic report. The report shows St Louis home prices decreased 11.34% in June, 2009 compared to June 2008 and, opposite the national trend, represented a 1.43% larger decline than Mays decline of 9.91 percent from the prior year.
CoreLogic’s approach to obtaining pricing data is excellent in my opinion. Instead of just basing their data on median home prices they look at “repeat sales” and, according to information provided by the company, more than 30 years worth of repeat sales transactions, representing more than 45 million observations. Nonetheless, I went ahead and did some of my own research to see if it supported the CoreLogic report.
To do this, I pulled information from Maris, the company which provides MLS data to REALTORS(R) throughout the St. Louis metropolitan area. I looked at the median sales price (I know, I already said this wasn’t the best approach, but it’s the best I’ve got) of homes sold in May and June of this year and compared to the same periods for last year. I just looked at St. Louis City and County, although the CoreLogic report probably takes in a little larger area, and here is what I found:
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Median price of homes sold in June 2009 – $152,250
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Median price homes sold June 2008 – $169,900
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Drop in price 10.3 percent
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Median price of homes sold in May 2009 – $135,000
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Median price of homes sold in June 2009 – $150,000
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Drop in price 10.0 percent
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So my numbers are pretty close to those of CoreLogic and, as I stated, I believe their method of looking at resale prices for the same house, is a much more accurate approach so I’m thinking what they published is reality.
St. Louis tends to lag behind the country frequently when it comes to market trends so hopefully we will see improvement in St Louis home prices declines soon.
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