Housing values are still growing

The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight recently released a comprehensive report on housing values with some interesting data. Overall, it shows the third quarter of 2006 as the slowest in housing value growth since 1998. Interestingly though, it’s still growth. In fact, even when you look at the annualized rate of 3.45% for the third quater’s growth rate of 0.86%, you see that the rate exceeds the Consumer Price Index growth of 3.1% in the last year. Furthermore, when you count the preceding three quarters, the growth rate in housing values over the last year is 7.7%, more than double the CPI. If every investment choice I ever made doubled the inflation rate in the “bad times”, I’d be sailing in the Virgin Islands today.