Standard and Poor’s to Track Condo Prices in Five U.S. Metro Areas

By Erika Schnitzer, Associate EditorNew York—Standard and Poor’s has launched a new index to track condominium prices in five major U.S. metropolitan areas—Boston, Chicago, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. The indices will include historical data beginning in January 1995.“Having access to a broader range of indices will allow property owners, investors and others to better understand how these different residential property types behave, while also providing a more complete picture of the overall existing residential property market,” says David M. Blitzer, managing director & chairman of the index committee, Standard & Poor’s.The five cities that were chosen for the condo indices can provide  adequate and useful data for that property type, noted Blitzer in a teleconference on the current and future state of the housing industry. While condo prices have fallen from their peak in all five of these cities, Blitzer explained that Los Angeles and San Francisco have taken the biggest hits, with 25.1 percent and 17.2 percent drops from peak, respectively. In Chicago, Boston and New York, the drops in peak were 5 percent, 8.4 percent and 3.6 percent, respectivelyBlitzer notes that San Francisco condo and home prices have followed distinctly different trends due to the fact that the city’s single-family home prices rose higher and faster than the other cities in the index, while the pattern of Boston’s home and condo prices track closely to each other.Standard & Poor’s will also be publishing seasonally adjusted versions of the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices and the new condo indices.