by Calculated Risk on 3/03/2007 01:18:00 PM

Floyd Norris writes in the NY Times: When It Comes to House Prices, the Bloom Is Off the Cactus

The [Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller home price] indexes, which now cover 20 regions, ... [record] all sales in an area, and then [compare] the price with the price that house fetched the last time it changed hands. They include only single-family homes, not condominiums or cooperative apartments, which can distort the picture in areas where such apartments form a major part of the housing market.

Click on graph for 12 areas.

The graphic shows the performance of the indexes, year over year, for 12 areas. They illustrate the wide regional variances, showing that Phoenix was not the only part of the desert that boomed. Las Vegas, with a 53 percent year-over-year rise in the fall of 2004, set the mark for best annual performance. In 2006, prices there rose just 0.9 percent.

Big coastal markets also did very well, although not to that extreme, and are now coming down. Prices in the New York region slipped just a bit in 2006, although that figure is distorted because it ignores Manhattan apartment prices, which have been strong. Larger declines were recorded in Boston, Washington, San Francisco and San Diego, but Los Angeles eked out a 2 percent rise for the year.