Over the last two years that I've been tracking regional home prices using the data supplied by Radar Logic, I've come to recognize the superiority of this data over other competitive home price series.Radar Logic provides daily data series for 25 metro housing markets (as well as a host of NYC series ... these series are by subscription only) that seek to track the price per square foot of all residential real estate (single family, condo, coop).
The data is superior to other home price data (S&P/Case-Shiller, FHFA, NAR median, etc.) because of its timeliness (daily), its quality (unique price per square foot methodology) and for the fact that each data series goes completely unadjusted.
In this way you get a real-time sense of the precise price movement for a particular metro market without the distortions that are commonly introduced by the mix of sales (median) or data smoothing techniques (S&P/Case-Shiller, FHFA).
As for the latest trends, it’s important to note that the 25-MSA Composite is continuing to show some of the first (albeit tepid) year-over-year increases seen in over two years.
The latest data shows that as of the middle of April, prices are 2.0% above the level seen in April 2009.
This price movement has been, of course, strongly influenced by the tremendous government subsidy of housing so we will need to see how this series trends out over the remainder of 2010 in order to determine the true price movement.
