The Most Splendid Housing Bubbles in America: Price Declines Spread to 25 Metros of Top 28, with 19 Below 2022 Peaks. 3 Set New Highs
Biggest declines: San Francisco, San Jose, Austin, Denver, San Diego, Seattle, Dallas, Salt Lake City, Honolulu, Phoenix, Portland, Houston, Los Angeles, Nashville, Charlotte, Tampa
Our series, “The Most Splendid Housing Bubbles in America,” started in 2017 to document visually metro-by-metro the massive surge in home prices that was starting to happen after years of interest rate repression and QE by the Fed. About 10 days ago we explained why we’d replace the Case-Shiller Home Price Index data that this series was based on with the “raw” Zillow Home Value Index (ZHVI). Today is the day! The ZHVI for August was released today.
Just to recap: The ZHVI is based on millions of data points in Zillow’s Database of All Homes, including from public records (tax data), MLS, brokerages, local Realtor Associations, real-estate agents, and individual households across the US. It includes pricing data for off-market deals and for-sale-by-owner deals. Zillow’s Database of All Homes also has sales-pairs data.
The data for the geographic areas that both indices cover are very similar: See our comment with charts. We cited three reasons for abandoning the Case-Shiller Index: It’s limited to 20 metros and excludes even big ones like Houston and Philadelphia; it lags months behind; and it’s not in dollar-prices, but only in index values set at 100 for the year 2000, which makes it impossible to compare price levels in different metros.
Visual depictions of the 28 “Most Splendid Housing Bubbles in America.”
To qualify for this list, the market must be one of the largest Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA) by population, and it must have a current ZHVI of over $300,000. The metros of New Orleans, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, etc. don’t qualify because their ZHVI is below $300,000, though they too had huge runups of home prices in recent years.
Down from their 2022 peaks: Home prices of 19 metros, of the 28 metros on this list, were down from their peaks in 2022, ranging from -19.8% in Austin to -1.2% in Minneapolis. The percentage below their 2022 peak is indicated for each metro below.
Declines in August: home prices in 25 metros, of the 28 on this list, declined month-over-month (MoM) in August, most notably these 15:
- San Francisco: -1.3%
- San Jose: -1.1%
- Austin: -1.0%
- Denver: -0.7%
- San Diego: -0.6%
- Seattle: -0.6%
- Dallas: -0.5%
- Salt Lake City: -0.5%
- Honolulu: -0.4%
- Phoenix: -0.4%
- Portland: -0.4%
- Houston: -0.3%
- Los Angeles: -0.3%
- Nashville: -0.3%
- Charlotte: -0.3%
New highs: Only 3 of the 28 metros set new highs: Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia…..
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Continue reading this analysis at Wolf Street.
