The December Case Shiller data was released this morning and November's median price for an existing home in Portland was down 13.1% year over year. (click on any chart to expand it to readable size)
The monthly change was even worse, down 2.5% from November, the largest drop we've seen to date. Or ever.
Portland is now down 15% from the peak in July 2007.
The chart above shows the price index for the past three years. You can clearly see that prices have now dropped beyond 2005 levels and continue to fall. Pop.
The above chart shows 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. The 20 city index started to flatten out a few months ago and it looks like the San Francisco Bay area has also started to slow down. We'll need a few more months of data before calling it a trend, but maybe prices have dropped enough for the scavengers to snap up foreclosures and prop up prices.
For comparison, the San Francisco market is down 30.8% in November, but was down 31.1.% in October. It looks like things might be stabilizing a bit down there.
Seattle also saw a massive drop in November, dropping 2.5% from October, and down 11.2% from last year.
This chart shows the price index for the past 8 years. I also added a line inpink this month that represents Portland's average 6.6% growth starting in September 2000. You can see that the current price index is now well below the historic growth line which tells me that our historic growth rate is not sustainable, given that it's nearly double the rate of inflation. Others will try to use this data to show we've reached the bottom (or passed it) I'm sure.
This chart is more for historical curiosity than anything. It 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!
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.
