Home Price Improvement Is Geographically Diverse

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Dec 7, 6:47AM EST

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The housing crisis has been the worse in five states — Nevada, California, Florida, Michigan and Arizona. A recovery has begun in states that have almost nothing in common geographically or demographically. In other words, the states where home prices have started to rise has not created a national pattern that makes sense.

New data from CoreLogic shows that home price improvements of more than 2% in October, compared to the same month last year, happened in West Virginia, South Dakota, New York, the District of Columbia, Kansas, Alaska and Mississippi.

Three of the states — Alaska, South Dakota and West Virginia — are sparsely populated. They have little else in common. Alaska’s personal income is among the highest in states. Mississippi and West Virgina have among the lowest.

Alaska and South Dakota have homogenous populations. The District of Columbia and New York have large “minority” populations. The same is true of Mississippi.

Whatever recovery patterns there may be, they have not started to help the states in which home prices have fallen the most. CoreLogic data shows that in October, among the 10 markets with the largest price drops were Arizona, California and Nevada.

Home prices may have started to recover across a patchwork of states that are not related in any way, at least on the surface. At the same time, the more troubled markets continue to be troubled.

Douglas A. McIntyre

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.