Searching for a bottom in housing prices in South Florida
That bottom in South Florida’s real estate crash can be tricky to spot.
Tuesday’s Case-Shiller numbers brought good news on home values, while obscure new data from a federal housing index shows accelerating drops in values across the region. The Federal Housing Finance Agency charts housing values using a method similar to the famed the Case-Shiller index, comparing recent sales to past sale prices on the same property.
The advantage to Case-Shiller’s South Florida index is it’s released each month, with new numbers out Tuesday morning showing a second month of increasing values in a region that includes Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties.
The advantage to the quarterly FHFA index is it gives data for Broward and Miami-Dade separately.
With Tuesday’s June Case-Shiller numbers, the indices seem to be parting ways. Case-Shiller showed the first back-to-back increase for South Florida since last summer. But the FHFA index shows continued decline.
That’s probably better news for South Florida’s real estate market, since Case-Shiller is widely watched and FHFA is mostly overlooked by national media.
In May, Case-Shiller showed a 1 percent uptick for South Florida in May and then less than a 1 percent gain in June. But FHFA continues to show declines through 2011, with a 4 percent drop for Broward from the first to the second quarter and a 3 percent drop in Miami-Dade.
Taking a step back, both indices continue telling the same story: home prices are off from 2010 — needless to say, a pretty bad year for real estate values in South Florida. But the truly discouraging news for homeowners with the FHFA numbers is it looked like a plateau might have been forming at the end of last year.
FHFA shows property values down between 7 and 8 percent over 2010 levels in South Florida, compared to a 6 percent gap in the first quarter and about a 2 percent gap as 2010 wound to a close. For Case-Shiller, values are down 5 percent compared to a 2 percent to 3 percent gap at the end of 2010.
The losses aren’t close to what the region saw during the depths of the real estate crash, of course. But for the crash to hit bottom, we’re going to need all the charts to show some straight lines before recovery can truly begin.
Report by DOUGLAS HANKS – Miami Herald
