Mapping Home Price Changes: Two Different Stories About Our Broader Community

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York tracks the year-over-year change in home prices across 1,200 U.S. counties and the nation as a whole. Realtor.com also publishes year-over-year home price changes. The two sets of data tell two very different stories.

A Las Cruces Digest Report
Sources: Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Realtor.com

If you read enough articles in Las Cruces Digest, you will begin to notice a theme. It is difficult for outsiders to figure out what is going on in Greater Las Cruces. While Santa Fe proudly proclaims itself the “City Different”, our broader community simply is… different. We are different without the motto, and we remain different without a motivation to be so. We are different because different is what works for us. Our community is so unique that one is hard pressed to find a single statistical metric that can measure what is actually happening here.

The Census Bureau has us all wrong. From year to year, they try to put our neighbors into different ethnic and racial boxes–and we don’t fit. What is the race or ethnicity of a native-born New Mexican of Spanish descent–like, 17th century Spanish descent? If your neighbors’ lineage dates back hundreds of years in our valleys, are they to be considered hispanic? Their name might identify them as such, but are they hispanic by any other metric?

These are all rhetorical questions that we, thankfully, don’t have to answer. The answers to these questions don’t matter to us because, simply put, we are all neighbors. As neighbors, one thing we have learned is how not to try to fit someone into a box, because we never fit.

Presented here is a pretty egregious difference in observations of our broader community. The numbers presented have to do with inflation and home prices. Since homes are where most Americans tend to hold most of their net worth (and debt), data on home prices and inflation is pretty important. It would be nice if the data told a definitive story; however, like in so many other instances, what we get from the data is another indication that outsiders have no way of accounting for our broader community.

2023 Year-Over-Year Change in Home Prices (CoreLogic)

^{Sources: CoreLogic; New York Fed staff calculations.}

According to the data provided by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (via CoreLogic), home prices in our broader community witnessed inflation greater than the national levels–in some cases, almost double the national rate.

Go to the FRB’s “Mapping Home Price Changes” website

2023 Year-Over-Year Change in Home Prices (Realtor.com)

^{Sources: Realtor.com; CoreLogic; New York Fed staff calculations.}

According to the data provided by Realtor.com, home prices in our broader community did not see consistent inflation above the national level–and in the last third of the year, saw a significant easing in home prices relative the the national numbers.

Go to the Realtor.com “Local Market Trends” website

Forbes Magazine (in their article: “China’s Choice: Muddy Stream Or Open Ocean?“) quotes a Chinese proverb that states: “Muddy water makes it easier to catch fish.” When trying to figure out inflation in the local housing market, it is safe to say…

The water is pretty muddy.

Article posted by:

Levi Gwaltney

Levi Gwaltney is the Editor In Chief of Las Cruces Digest. The Editor makes editorial and posting decisions regarding content published on this site. In most cases, the Editor makes little if any contribution to content published, and takes no credit for the content of republished posts. If available, the source or author of posts is provided at the top of the article.