USA Today Takes a Closer Look at Case Shiller

S&P/Case Shiller released their monthly stats today.  If it’s the last Tuesday of the month, it must be time for stale news.  But instead of the usual,  “this is what happened months ago” in real estate trends, like the rest of the world wasn’t paying attention, it was nice to see this USA Today article address some of the inadequacies of Case Shiller’s methodology instead of just reporting the numbers.

As most informed MRIS subscribers already know, Case Shiller reports on activity two months after the fact, AND in reporting on sales two months ago, is actually reporting on contract activity that happened five months ago.  Makes us feel good that RBI reports come out on the tenth of the month following the month on which we’re reporting.  We choose to show each month’s actual activity instead of smoothing out the results with multiple month running averages.  If there was a spike in contract activity during a particular month, don’t you want to see that and the impact it had on the rest of the year’s buying and selling cycle?

Kudos USA Today for paying attention to the methods and not just the madness in this recovering market!