Home Value Forecast Methodology

Home Value Forecast provides insight into the current and future state of the U.S. housing market.

HVF is built using numerous housing and economic data sources. The top 750 CBSAs as well as data down to the ZIP code level for approximately 18,000 ZIPs are available with a subscription to the service. A CBSA level real estate market ranking system has been developed for Home Value Forecast. The rankings are run for the single family home markets in the top 200 CBSAs on a monthly basis to highlight the best and worst metros with regard to a number of leading real estate market based indicators. These include:

• Number of Active Listings
• Average Sold Price
• Average Listing Price
• Number of Foreclosure Sales
• Number of Sales
• Number of New Listings
• Average Active Market Time

The ranking system is purely objective and is based on the directional trend of each of these series using actual data over the past 8 quarters. The trends are then defined as being increasing, stable or decreasing. Each indicator is given a score based on whether the trend is positive, negative or neutral for that series. For example, a declining trend in active listings would be positive as would be an increasing trend in average price. A composite score for each CBSA is calculated by summing the directional scores of each of its indicators, and is meant to identify those metros which have the highest probability of price appreciation over the next 6 to 24 months. From the universe of the top 200 CBSAs, we highlight each month the CBSAs which have the highest composite scores.