FHFA: Colorado house prices fall 1.5 percent in Colorado during third quarter

Colorado's House Price (Expanded-Data) Index (HPI), measured by the Federal Housing and Finance Agency (FHFA), fell 1.5 percent from the third quarter of 2010 to the same period this year. According to the third quarter 2011 HPI, released Tuesday by FHFA, the home price index for Colorado, in year-over-year comparisons, has fallen for the fifth quarter in a row while the national index has fallen for the 18th quarter in a row.

The Colorado HPI has now down 13.6 percent from the peak in the state's HPI which was reached during the third quarter of 2006. The national index is down 23 percent from its peak, which it also reached during the third quarter of 2006.

The HPI for the United States fell 2.8 percent from the third quarter of 2010 to the same period this year, and the national HPI has not shown a year-over-year increase since the first quarter of 2007.

The first graph shows the Colorado HPI compared to the US HPI since 2001. Since the peak period, the US HPI has fallen farther than the Colorado index.



In this index, the US price index can be described as slightly more "bubble-like" than the Colorado index which did not experience a run up in prices to the same degree as was the case in the national index. Although Colorado's index is higher, the index value increased much more from 2001 to the peak nationally than in Colorado. From 2001 to the third quarter of 2006, the national HPI increased 51 percent, while it only increased 23 percent in Colorado. In turn, the correction has been more severe nationally.

In the second graph is shown the year-over-year change in the HPI for both Colorado and the US. This more fully shows to what degree the HPI has fallen in recent year for both Colorado and the US. With the exception of the first quarter of 2011, the national HPI has fallen farther than the Colorado HPI in every quarter since the third quarter of 2007.



Overall, this index suggests that, since 2007, overall home prices in Colorado have been more resilient than has been the case nationally. In Colorado, there was even a brief period of increasing prices, year over year, in late 2009 and early 2010.

The index values presented and analyzed in this article are not seasonally adjusted.

Note: During the second quarter, the Federal Housing and Finance Agency released, for the first time, its Expanded-Data House Price Index. The new index is "Estimated using Enterprise, FHA, and Real Property County Recorder Data Licensed from DataQuick[.]"

In other words, the data source is much more broad than the old index which relied only on GSE information.

However, at the metro-are level, we'll still need to rely on the older GSE-data index until FHFA expands its new index into the metro areas.