VITAL SIGNS INDICATOR Home Prices (EC7) FULL MEASURE NAME Home Prices LAST UPDATED August 2019 DESCRIPTION Home prices refer to the cost of purchasing one’s own house or condominium. While a significant share of residents may choose to rent, home prices represent a primary driver of housing affordability in a given region, county or city. DATA SOURCE Zillow Median Sale Price (1997-2018) http://www.zillow.com/research/data/ Bureau of Labor Statistics: Consumer Price Index All Urban Consumers Data Table (1997-2018; specific to each metro area) http://data.bls.gov CONTACT INFORMATION vitalsigns.info@bayareametro.gov METHODOLOGY NOTES (across all datasets for this indicator) Median housing price estimates for the region, counties, cities, and zip code come from analysis of individual home sales by Zillow. The median sale price is the price separating the higher half of the sales from the lower half. In other words, 50 percent of home sales are below or above the median value. Zillow defines all homes as single-family residential, condominium, and co-operative homes with a county record. Single-family residences are detached, which means the home is an individual structure with its own lot. Condominiums are units that you own in a multi-unit complex, such as an apartment building. Co-operative homes are slightly different from condominiums where the homeowners own shares in the corporation that owns the building, not the actual units themselves. For metropolitan area comparison values, the Bay Area metro area’s median home sale price is the population-weighted average of the nine counties’ median home prices. Home sales prices are not reliably available for Houston, because Texas is a non-disclosure state. For more information on non-disclosure states, see: http://www.zillow.com/blog/chronicles-of-data-collection-ii-non-disclosure-states-3783/ Inflation-adjusted data are presented to illustrate how home prices have grown relative to overall price increases; that said, the use of the Consumer Price Index does create some challenges given the fact that housing represents a major chunk of consumer goods bundle used to calculate CPI. This reflects a methodological tradeoff between precision and accuracy and is a common concern when working with any commodity that is a major component of CPI itself.

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