JG: I don't cite Zillow at all. It's been so wrong in specific cases too often for me to trust whatever algorithm they use to price houses. Watching the house my parents sold in 1996 for 140k go up to 700k - a year after a sale for 350k - doesn't inspire confidence. I also wonder what makes you think there's two different worlds - Case-Schiller reports on real sale prices, which of course take place in the real world, yet you seem to think that there is some other, different real world out there. Odd.
In any case, trolling me doesn't actually answer the question I posed to the OP, which is what gave them the impression that prices had gone up over the past few months and that they would continue to rise along with interest rates rising (an odd prediction barring hyperinflation).
edit: I realize I should offer something other than "Zillow is wrong" as my rebuttal to JG. Simply put, I have a hard time trusting most "official" statistical aggregations and prefer to look at all of them along with whatever I can cobble together myself from the raw data. Here are the graphs you get going YOY for Sussex and Morris county, based on their public deed records available online:
Notes:
- Number of sales is number of sales * 10 so that it will show up on the graph.
- Sussex doesn't have many records prior to 2002 - only ~80 sales in 2002 and then far less for a few years prior. Morris has strong records starting in 1993, but almost none prior.
- Morris had a few years (2006,2007) with obvious outliers or errors (sales at ~$200 million) which lead to very high average sales for those years (over $1 million) which skewed the graph. I normalized those years to the same averages as the years prior and after. Median sales I left untouched.
- Oops! I mislabeled the Morris Graph. Yellow should be "median" and pink should be "average". Apologies!
I probably should do the work to tease out the monthly numbers, but the yearly numbers are pretty clear.
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Looking for Good Buyer's Agent - Morris/Sussex
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