Zillow Says Real-Estate Market Not as Bad as It Looks

Newspaper headlines earlier this week reported a dramatic 19 percent decline in housing prices based on the Case-Shiller index of real-estate prices.
Stan Humphries, writing on the Zillow blog, notes that Zillow’s price index didn’t fall as much as Case-Shiller.
The difference is that Zillow’s index does not include foreclosures, but Case-Shiller does. Humphries notes that a staggering percentage of the transactions being recorded are foreclosures. In Las Vegas, 79 percent of the observations going into the Case-Shiller index are foreclosures. In Phoenix it is 68 percent. In contrast, only 11 percent of Boston transactions are foreclosures.