Taxation & Estate Planning

Housing Price Statistics

By Joel A. Schoenmeyer

Almost three years ago -- soon after I started writing this blog -- I posted about how real estate sales statistics tend to shed more heat than light. Here's that post.

This still happens in a down market, like the one we have now. Each Sunday, in a feature called Price Pulse, The Chicago Tribune real estate section runs the numbers for a different area of Chicago. This week the focus was West Cook County and DuPage County, using figures from August - October 2007 (and the same period in 2006). The "results" are shown in a half-page color map.

My biggest complaint about Price Pulse is that its focus is on increase/decrease in value, and not on the effect of a good or bad market on the number of houses sold. While Price Pulse includes total units sold, the emphasis is on whether there was an increase or decrease. That's not particularly helpful, especially in municipalities where few houses are sold. (For instance, in Wayne, Illinois, the median price of houses sold went from $720,000 in Aug. - Oct. 2006 to $466,00 in Aug. - Oct. 2007. Given that only 5 houses were sold in the '06 period, and only 2 were sold in the '07 period, are these figures at all meaningful?)

Here's a quicker way to quantify what's going on in an area's real estate market, one that takes into account median price and number of houses sold. Basically, it just involves multiplying these numbers together, as you would for a company that sells widgets or spark plugs. You can then quantify the drop in "gross sales." For instance,...

I live in Oak Park. From Aug. - Oct. 2006, 348 homes were sold in Oak Park, with a median price of $310,000. From Aug. - Oct. 2007, the median price actually increased -- to $310,750 -- but the number of homes sold dropped to 272. Is it at all accurate to think that the Oak Park real estate market went up, based on the small increase in median price? I don't think so. Rather, I'd show the Oak Park market by doing the following calculations:

Aug. - Oct. 2006: 348 x 310,000 = $107.88 million in gross sales

Aug. - Oct. 2007: 272 x 310,750 = $84.524 million in gross sales

That's a decrease of about 22%, which is a number that makes sense to me. Overall, the "big" municipalities (which I define as municipalities with sales of 100 or more units in Aug. - Oct. 2006 and in Aug. - Oct. 2007) in West Cook and DuPage saw a decrease in gross sales of 23.50%. Berwyn had the highest decrease (57.84%).

Full post as published by Death and Taxes Blog on March 10, 2008 (boomark / email).