Arizona Real Estate Notebook

Karl Guntermann at Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey School of Business; Center for Real Estate Theory and Practice puts together an index of home prices in the Phoenix area based on repeat home sales.

Guntermann takes the analytical methodology used by Case-Shiller and applies it to the Valley of the Sun. Case-Shiller only publish information for the metropolitan Phoenix area as a whole while Guntermann gets more “granular” and runs an index for several cities in the metro area as well as a composite index for Phoenix as a whole.

In this graph below you can see that the home price index dropped below trend in July. (The latest published data is for July. It takes the economists a while to run all the math on the home sales numbers to get the index.)

You, of course, might draw a different trend line. And home prices might still be above your trend line.

Nevertheless, you get the point.

Prices were way down and near trend… in July.

And prices are lower now than in July.