Roundtrip: Housing's Back to Square One

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It’s been an amazing 8 year period for housing.  Floyd Norris shows us how eerily similar the rise and fall of home prices and inflation have been:

From the New York Times:
During the period, the Standard & Poor’s Case-Shiller 20-city composite index of home prices rose almost 21 percent. The Consumer Price Index also rose almost 21 percent.

We also get a glance of which housing markets have performed the best and worst over this 8 year time frame:

Unsurprisingly, New York is bucking the national trend:

At the other extreme is New York, where the boom was not nearly as strong as in some areas but a larger part of the gains have been retained. At the height of the period, New York prices had outpaced inflation by 62 percent. At the latest report, prices are still up by 20 percent more than inflation.

Wonder how much longer that can continue.

Sources:

Off the Charts – Home Prices (NYT)