This morning, the S&P Case/Shiller Home Price Index, which measures prices in 20 US metropolitan regions, registered an 18.1% decline in prices. And for as bad as this sounds, its actually the best reading in 6 months. According to Bloomberg, one of the index’s designers, Yale economist Robert Shiller said he saw “striking improvement in the rate of decline” in April.

No metro area experienced year-over-year gains, but declines from the previous month eased for the 3rd month in a row. Las Vegas is still in horrible shape, tallying a 32% year-over-year tumble, along with Phoenix where prices have fallen more than 35% from last year. Phoenix is down more than 50% since the peak in June 2006.

As high end markets continue to tumble while low end markets grope for a bottom, it will be interesting to see if the Case/Shiller Index — which is a value-weighted measurement, ie, it weighs higher value homes more than low value ones — diverges from median home price data reported by the National Association of Realtors.

For more on how to dissect average price data, please read Straight Up Statistics – Deconstructing the Average.

Tags: average, case shiller, home prices, median

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 at 5:14 pm and is filed under Mortgages. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.