Portland Existing Home Prices Drop 15.3% in March - Case Shiller

The March Case Shiller data was released today and March's median price for an existing home in Portland was down 15.3% from March 2008. (click on any chart to expand it to readable size)

The monthly change was down 2.1% from February, about the same as the 1.9% drop from January to February.

The median Portland home price is now down 20.8% from the peak in July 2007.


The chart above shows the price index for the past five years. I had to go beyond 3 years as we are now staring at the same prices seen back in June 2005, almost 4 years ago

The above chart shows growth rates for Portland, Seattle, the San Francisco bay area (the other areas I consider as closest to Portland) as well as the 20-city composite index. Portland and Seattle are tracking each other very closely, still about a year behind the rest of the market.

While the price index continues to fall everywhere, the growth rate (or decline rate) for the 20-City index as well as for the San Francisco Bay Area markets appears to have reached an inflection point. We need a few more months of data before calling it a trend, but it looks like there are signs of a bottom approaching for the Bay Area as well as the rest of the country.

February was the first month where the price decline didn't set a new record for the SF Bay Area and for the overall 20 city index.

This chart shows the price index for the past 8 years. I also added a line in pink this month that represents an average of 5% growth starting in January 2001. You can see that the current price index is now below the 5% average growth line. An over-correction is to be expected, but we are also probably correcting to a more reasonable 3-4% long term growth rate, or about the rate of inflation. But it's likely that we'll over correct before getting there.

This chart shows the previous bubble in the early 90's, and also shows that Portland prices had never dropped over the past 20 years, until 2008. But as they say, past performance is no guarantee of future performance!

What else would you guys like to see? Any predictions on when/where we'll see the price bottom?

{Note, my apologies for the gap in posting. My folks were in town, then my company decided to give me a huge project to work on. I'm not complaining, I'd much rather be overworked right now than unemployed, but it has cut into my personal time}

ABOUT CASE SHILLER:
The S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices measures the residential housing market, tracking changes in the value of the residential real estate market in 20 metropolitan regions across the United States. These indices use the repeat sales pricing technique to measure housing markets. First developed by Karl Case and Robert Shiller, this methodology collects data on single-family home re-sales, capturing re-sold sale prices to form sale pairs. This index family consists of 20 regional indices and two composite indices as aggregates of the regions.