St. Louis Real Estate News; St Louis home prices fall in September but projected to increase 2.4 percent in next twelve months

Dennis Norman

According to a report issued by First American CoreLogic national home prices continue to decline with their HPI (Loan Performance Home Price Index) declining by 9.8 percent in September 2009 compared with the year before.  If you take the distressed sales out (foreclosures, short sales, etc) the nation decline in HIP for the same period was 6.2 percent.

St. Louis home prices did better according to the report with the HPI declining 3.85 percent in Sepetember 2009 from the year before.  This is an improvement over August which was down 4.09 percent from the year before.  If we ignore the distressed sales, then the decline for September was 2.10 percent compared to August’s decline of 3.18 percent.

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.

CoreLogic is forecasting that it’s HPI for St. Louis will appreciate 2.41 percent in the next year.  After all the declines we have seen in home prices, appreciation of any kinds sounds good to me at this point.