July CoreLogic Home Price Report
CoreLogic released its monthly home price report for June/July earlier this morning. Unlike S&P/Case-Shiller, which is a rolling 3-month average repeat sales index,CoreLogic is a single month index released on almost no lag. Essentially, it gives you information three months more current than what you get from Case-Shiller.
CoreLogic estimates that home prices rose +7.0% YoY in July, a deceleration vs the +7.5% in June and +8.3% in May. We show this in the first chart below.
Interestingly, in the past few months we've seen material upward revisions to the preliminary estimates for the most recent month-ended. In the last two months, however, the revision was negative. The preliminary estimate for June was +7.7% and the final number came in at +7.5%. Meanwhile, May has been downwardly revised twice in the last two month. It began at +8.9%, was cut to 8.8% and is now 8.3%.
Its also worth noting that while sales comps begin to ease through 2H14, price comps don’t really begin to ease until Feb 2015 (hardest near-term comp is Oct which was +11.9% YoY). As such, we think the next 6-8 months of worsening pricing data will weigh on the housing complex.
Our main thesis on housing is that the rate of home price appreciation will slow meaningfully over the course of 2014 and into 2015. Historically, inflections in the rate of HPI or HPD have been major macro drivers of relative positive or negative performance.
