Weiss map of New York City market.

Appreciating Homes Increased in Third Quarter but Still Trail 2014

December 4, 2015 in Featured, Forecasts, Housing Forecasts, Housing Markets, Housing Recovery, Maps of Housing Values, Market Trends, Recovery Signals 1 Comment

The number of homes nationwide gaining value on a monthly basis increased during the third quarter from 56.80 percent in July to 59.37 percent of all homes in September and the appreciation rate increased for the third straight month. However, the percentage of homes gaining value still trails the rate of 66.31 percent in September 2014, Allan Weiss, CEO of Weiss Analytics, reported

As more homes moved out of price stagnation (with annual value change within plus 1.5% to -1.5% per year) houses both appreciating and decreasing both increased. The percentage of homes losing value rose during the quarter, from 23.40 percent in July to 26.37 percent in September.

Unlike reports based on listings or sales prices that cover only the 3 to 4 percent of homes that are sold every year, Weiss Analytics tracks actual values for all homes, using repeat sales indexes for nearly 45 million individual properties. The Weiss index database makes it possible to provide highly accurate value trends for specific addresses and measure trends in change values on a hyper local level. Weiss home value forecasts are widely used to determine owners’ equity, help home buyers make decisions and provide accurate forecasts of future value for lenders and investors.

“It’s too soon to know if the gain over the past three months will become a significant trend. We are still seven points below the appreciation rate last year and the gap in depreciating homes has grown to more than 12 points—a cause for concern in many markets. Moreover, trends in appreciation are reflecting significant regional differences. Hotter markets in the West and Pacific States reflect rising prices and impact affordability in some markets. Levels of appreciation found in markets like Trenton, Worcester and Allentown are falling at double digit rates,” said Allan Weiss, CEO of Weiss Analytics and former CEO of Case Shiller Weiss.

National Percentages of Appreciating and Depreciating Homes

	September	August	July	September 2014
Total Appreciating	59.37%	59.20%	56.80%	66.31%
Total Depreciating	26.37%	27.00%	23.40%	14.24%

Selected Markets

The selected markets below illustrate the regional nature of appreciation trends today. Markets that enjoyed high rates of participation in rising values like San Francisco, Miami, Los Angeles and Denver have seen their participation rates drop dramatically. Among these markers, only Phoenix has a higher rate than it did a year ago.

Metro	September 2014	September 2015
Denver-Aurora-Lakewood, CO	94.9%	85.6%
Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA	88.3%	80.5%
San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward, CA	97.5%	78.8%
Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale, AZ	66.5%	72.5%
Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA	81.3%	67.7%
Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach, FL	91.0%	66.7%
Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA	90.2%	58.3%
Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN-WI	58.2%	53.0%
New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA	53.2%	48.3%
Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV	48.3%	47.5%

Top Performing Markets

In September Flint, MI led the nation in percentage of appreciating homes, reaching 100 percent of the properties in the Weiss Analytics database, a 39.3 percent improvement over a year ago. Second was Reno, NV with 92.9 percent of homes appreciating. Portland was third with 96.3 percent. Six of the ten markets are Western.

Metro	Sep-14	Sep-15	Change
Flint, MI	60.7%	100.0%	39.3%
Reno, NV	98.0%	92.9%	-5.0%
Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro, OR-WA	93.8%	86.3%	-7.5%
Denver-Aurora-Lakewood, CO	94.9%	85.6%	-9.4%
Stockton-Lodi, CA	93.9%	84.8%	-9.1%
San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA	94.0%	84.4%	-9.6%
Port St. Lucie, FL	94.5%	84.0%	-10.5%
Madison, WI	61.3%	81.3%	19.9%
Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA	88.3%	80.5%	-7.8%
Palm Bay-Melbourne-Titusville, FL	91.0%	79.8%	-11.3%

Bottom Performing Markets

Trenton NJ registered the smallest percentage of appreciating markets among the top 150 markets in September after the list of bottom performing markets in August. Five of the ten markets below are doing better this year than they were last year. None of the markets are located west of the Mississippi and seven are in the Northeast.

Metro	Sep-14	Sep-15	Change
Little Rock-North Little Rock-Conway, AR	31.9%	41.7%	9.9%
Hartford-West Hartford-East Hartford, CT	30.1%	41.5%	11.4%
Scranton-Wilkes-Barre-Hazleton, PA	24.1%	39.5%	15.3%
Kingsport-Bristol-Bristol, TN-VA	47.4%	39.4%	-8.1%
Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton, PA-NJ	51.8%	38.7%	-13.1%
Peoria, IL	34.6%	36.4%	1.8%
Worcester, MA-CT	56.7%	36.1%	-20.6%
Harrisburg-Carlisle, PA	29.9%	33.3%	3.4%
Baltimore-Columbia-Towson, MD	34.1%	31.8%	-2.3%
Trenton, NJ	40.2%	29.4%	-10.8%

The data from Weiss Analytics is incorporated in Owners.com’s Trend Tracking Tool™, where consumers can uncover the pricing trends that are shaping the future of their neighborhoods. Consumers can also see recent value changes and one year forecasts for 5500 Zip codes and 100 metros at http://www.weissindex.com/.

About Weiss Analytics

Weiss Analytics was founded to help fill the knowledge and innovation gap that led to the great housing crash of 2007 as well as to help mitigate the financial risk of home ownership going forward. WA is a pioneer in next generation home price analytics. Building on Weiss’ unique expertise in repeat sales home price indexes, he has increased the resolution of market analysis by nearly 10,000-fold. WA has created 45 million repeat sales indexes, one for each house, through the use of Big Data techniques, novel algorithms and by harnessing the power of massively parallel multi-CPU computing power.

Weiss’ approach presents home price dynamics at the house level or any user-defined aggregation. Instead of being forced to use arbitrary market definitions such as ‘metro area’, users can define their own markets such as ‘all houses with a current value above $500,000 within a 50-mile radius of the Statue of Liberty”. In some cases, markets organically define themselves as can be seen by the clustering in our market maps and dynamic maps. New trends can therefore be discovered, new sub markets defined, compared and ranked.

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