Home Price Indexes – Who’re you going to believe?

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3 

Figure 1 – Chart of quarterly OFHEO regular home price index (top chart) data and year-over-year rate of change (lower chart). This index did not peak until Q2-2007 and the year-over-year chart shows prices still rising.Data - OFHEO

Figure 2 – Monthly S&P Case-Shiller home price index data showing a peak in July 2006, a full year before the regular OFHEO HPI. As we see here, the CS HPI shows prices beginning to drop in January 2007 while the OFHEO HPI would have us believe that prices are still rising. Data- S&P Case-Shiller.

Figure 3 – Here is the quarterly OFHEO Purchase Only Final Adjusted HPI that is much more similar to the Case-Shiller chart above. The problem is that the latest data on the OFHEO website is a year old (March 2007) so of little use in showing recent changes in home prices. Data – OFHEO.