Route27

After the housing crash and the bailout of the crashing wall street firms and the American credit crunch does anyone still think about what the value of their home is? Zillow and other Real estate valuation websites were rocking with traffic when real estate investing was like day trading in slow motion.

Real estate agents in big cities down play the loosing values by arguing that averages don’t always translate to neighborhoods. I would agree that in general that is true. However, in general my favorite real estate indicator is the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices.

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

Sounds pretty fancy, but here is a great application of this data - you can download the spreadsheet with the raw data on the site. Then for kicks, if your city is in the list, plug in the date of your home purchase and play it against current value to calculate a percentage increase or decrease.

Here is a graph of a typical property’s worth purchased in July 2005 in the Chicago Metropolitan Area.