Florida’s Real Estate – Are we at the bottom yet?
According to the most recent S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index, its looks like Florida real estate may have found a bottom.
S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index for Florida (click to enlarge)
What is the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index anyway? It’s actually 23 indices. There are 20 separate city or metropolitan area indices for the U.S., two composite indices and a national index. The indices lag by 2 months. Therefore, the latest index is as of July, 2009.
How do they work? According to Standardandpoors.com “The methodology measures the movement in price of single-family homes in certain regions. This is done by collecting data on sale prices of specific single-family homes in the region…When a specific home is resold, months or years later, the new sale price is matched to the home’s first sale price…The difference in the sale pair is measured and recorded. All the sales pairs in a region are then aggregated into one index”
What do the actual values on the indices represent? The indices have a base value of 100 in January 2000. Any differences in the values going forward represent percent increase or decreases in appreciation. (i.e. if an index value changes 205 to 210 from one period to the next, that represents a 5% increase)
We looked at the latest 20 city index to see if there have been any trends for Florida’s real estate. In the 20 city index there are actually 2 indices for Florida, one for Miami and another for the Tampa metropolitan areas. So how did Florida do? Well, as of the latest report, both areas have had gains for the last 2 months. For July, Miami’s index value was 147.27 which is an increase of 1.3% over the previous month but a 21.2% drop from the same period last year. The Tampa area had an index value of 142.84 or an increase of 1.4% over the previous month. This was a drop of 18.4% from the same period last year. To put this in perspective, we’ve compiled the above chart using the last 5 years of data from this index for both areas.