The following article appeared in the Triangle Business Journal recently:

Raleigh's home prices stay strong

Triangle Business Journal

Home prices grew by 4.8 percent in the Raleigh area between the second quarter of 2007 and the second quarter of this year, new federal data say.

The figures, from the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, tend to overstate the actual growth in home prices across the country. But they are useful on a comparative level, and by that measure, they place the Raleigh-Cary region at No. 13 among the nearly 300 areas tracked in terms of home price appreciation.

Prices in the Durham region, which also includes Orange County, grew by 4.1 percent, putting the region at No. 26 overall.

Nationally, OFHEO says, home prices slipped by 1.7 percent in the last year.

The OFHEO data have their limits. Specifically, they do not include homes with mortgages that can't be bought by government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. That means most homes owned by subprime borrowers, the hardest hit part of the market, aren't included in the index – helping to make housing price declines look less severe in OFHEO data than in other indices.

For example, another widely cited barometer of housing prices, the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller index, said home prices fell by 15.4 percent nationally in the second quarter from a year earlier.

That 20-city index does not provide data on Raleigh housing, though they also provide some indication that North Carolina home prices are holding up better than most. Charlotte showed the lowest drop in prices among the 20 cities tracked, with home prices there falling just 1 percent from June 2007 to June 2008.

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