Oregon Housing Update

Let's check in and see what's up with Oregon house prices. Here is the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight's House Price Index (HPI), which I blogged about before. The Q4 07 results are in and here is what it looks like:



Note that, as before the high fliers are falling the most and the ones that did not see such heavy appreciation are not. Lucky for me, I suppose, Corvallis seems to be doing OK, but data points here are few so it is hard to make any generalizations. Here is the same data as expressed as quarter by quarter percentage changes:



The news is, once again, not good in Bend and Medford and now Eugene has seen its first quarter by quarter decline. Portland barely stays in positive territory and Corvallis has held steady. But the spring data will be especially telling and the Case/Shiller data should be out next week for February.

And, by the way, as more and more news reports are starting to point out, averages hide a lot of heterogeneity in local housing markets. A lot of the decline in house prices is being fueled by steep drops in prices of speculative developments on the far fringes of metro areas (here is a nice story from NPR).