Q4 Real Estate Performance: The Medium is the Message

It’s time again to release our quarterly real estate reports. For these 2006 fourth quarter results, we’re taking a slightly different approach than in the past when we released detailed reports and analysis for five specific markets and an overall national summary. Instead, this quarter, we’re releasing all the underlying data on which we based the earlier reports and we’re providing this data for a total of 75 different metropolitan regions around the country.

We get a lot of demand for the underlying data itself and the real estate blogosphere is rabid in consuming new data and producing incredible insights from it. So, we thought we’d unleash the data and take advantage of the fact that there are a lot more analysts out there than there are here at Zillow. As Marshall McLuhan foretold, how we’re providing the data is at least as important as the data itself. So have some fun with the data, combine your local knowledge and insights and share with the community.

Here you’ll find links to MS Excel files for 75 metro areas and the U.S. overall, all lovingly put together by our own Tommy Unger. Each file contains a table of contents explaining what’s in each file. For each metro area, we’ve broken down Zindex values by county, city and neighborhood (or ZIP Code where we couldn’t identify neighborhoods). While we’re eager to see how our visitors use the data, we will also be doing our own deeper analyses into the data which will be posted here on the Zillow Blog.

So what does the data reveal about the fourth quarter of 2006? Overall, across the U.S. areas Zillow covers, home values showed their first year-over-year (YoY) decline since the start of the data series in 1997, with the Zindex recording a slight decrease of 0.48% from its Q4 2005 level (see the figure below). This is substantially down from the year-over-year increase of 5.0% in Q3 and the quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) change of -4.8% for Q4 is significantly off the 2.4% QoQ increase in the prior quarter.

Performance varies widely by metropolitan area as seen in figure below showing year-over-year appreciation rates for the top 25 largest metro areas. Seattle, Portland and Charlotte appear to be booming with YoY increases above 11%. Greenville, Sacramento and Boston are lagging with YoY decreases greater than 5%.

We’re going to dig deeper into neighborhood and ZIP code data in some of these cities in the coming days and weeks. Any particular cities you’d like us to highlight? Leave a comment and let us know.

Dr. Stan Humphries is a real estate economist and real estate expert for Zillow. Stan is in charge of the data and analytics team at Zillow, which develops housing market data for most major metropolitan statistical areas in the U.S., and provides economic research for current real estate market conditions. He helped create the algorithms for the popular Zestimate® home value and the Zillow Home Value Index (ZHVI).