Change in Housing Prices
The Graph of the Week shows the year over year change in the median price for new homes from the Census Bureau. The graph is from the Focus on Statistics article "Comparing Aggregate Housing Price Measures" from the October 207 issue of Business Economics by Jordan Rappaport. From the article:
Figure 3 depicts the growth rate of the Bureau’s median new home value series from December 1990 through June 2007. Over this period, the estimated nominal median value rises 82 percent from $127,000 to $231,000. A seasonally adjusted series is indistinguishable from the unadjusted series and thus is not shown. Notice that the Census Bureau median values are upward sloping in the long term but contain numerous short-term downward- sloping portions.Most likely, these capture compositional effects arising from the sales sample rather than any true decline in aggregate price.
The abstract of the article is here. The entire article is available to NABE members.