Home prices go haywire coast to coast

The most recent CoreLogic [stock CLGX][/stock] Housing Price Index, scheduled for public release next week, will show home prices dipped 3.35% nationally from November 2009 to November 2010. But digging deeper into the housing numbers shows they’ve gone haywire and defy a ready explanation. The worse state, including distressed sales? It’s Idaho, which lost 12.57% on home prices in the same time frame. That’s followed by Alabama, at 10.27%. After that, it’s a more obvious Arizona, which lost 9.25% of home value on average and has been plagued by the foreclosure crisis. But there is one constant, actually. Sadly, we can’t report that any markets appreciated significantly, except for Maine, which gained 3.52%, followed by North Dakota at 3.22%. No other markets increased prices by more than 2%. What the HPI does show, however, is that the rate at which prices are dropping is slowing dramatically. But wait, that isn’t the case in Idaho, where from May 2009 to May 2010, prices only fell 6%. Actually, as far as I can tell, prices stopped appreciating in almost all markets from June 2010 to July 2010. Of course, taking a more indepth local view of data is necessary for anyone to get a lock on their respective models. But in the case of CoreLogic, the above numbers  only represent a larger look at localized markets. “Of note, including distressed sales, the month-over-month price decline in November was the largest in 2010,” commented Royal Bank of Scotland analysts in a note to clients on the CoreLogic data. “However, excluding distressed sales, the month-over-month price decline in November was smaller than the prints in the past couple of months.” Compare the numbers to Case-Shiller MSAs, which the RBS team does, and things really begin to get out-of-whack. For one, none of the top-20 MSAs in Case-Shiller are in Idaho. Same holds true for Maine and North Dakota. In the same year-over-year timeframe, house prices fell 9.93% in Miami. Other sand state markets fill the categories for greatest home price drops along with Seattle, which ranks fourth with an average 7.61% decline. The New York MSA, in contrast, shows a modest increase. On the contrary, according to CoreLogic, the state of New York is showing a modest decrease. The difference may seem minor but the implications are a world apart. Jacob Gaffney is the editor of HousingWire. Follow him on Twitter @JacobGaffney. Write to him.