From James Kimmons,
Your Guide to Real Estate Business.
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The US Housing Market is of huge importance to the overall economy. Those of us engaged in any aspect of the business of real estate need to understand the marketplace and changes taking place in it. One excellent, yet not very widely followed tool, is the Standard and Poors Case-Shiller Indices.

In the 1980's, Karl E. Case and Robert J. Shiller constructed this methodology and took great care in designing these index indicators to be accurate and indicative of real price change in single family residences. Condominiums and Multi-family are not included. The single most important factor in the process is called the "repeat sales index technique." They're only using data from more than one sale of the same single family home. Only repeat sales of the same property are used.

There are 20 urban areas, each with its own index. These are:

• Boston, MA
• New York, NY
• Detroit, MI
• Cleveland, OH
• Washington D.C.
• Charlotte, NC
• Atlanta, GA
• Tampa, FL
• Miami, FL
• Chicago, IL
• Minneapolis, MN
• Dallas, TX
• Denver, CO
• Phoenix, AZ
• Las Vegas, NV
• San Diego, CA
• Los Angeles, CA
• San Francisco, CA
• Portland, OR
• Seattle, WA

They then develop one index for the entire country. If you're in, or close to, one of the urban areas, you'll probably find the index quite valuable for long term knowledge of price changes locally. If not, for the most part, the national index runs pretty parallel to most of the locales. Read what else the Case-Shiller Indices do in their methodology to create a highly accurate record of actual residential real estate price changes over time.