In 2006 Robert Shiller made a bold statement.  He said prices could drop 20% or more when the housing bubble burst.  At the time I thought he was a blow-hard lunatic.  The market showed no signs of slowing and demand outstripped the supply.  “What would cause that to change?” I lamented at the time.  Crow.  I ate it, I sautéed it; for breakfast lunch and dinner for going on 4 years I’ve been eating crow, but today I feel just a little retribution.  For those of you who’ve been following TheRealEstateConversation.com, you know I called the worst is over last month.  And while I do not anticipate steady or even regular appreciation for housing, I do feel my call was right and today’s Case-Shiller report supports my call.

If you were just reading the headlines, you’d see that  Gloomberg, err, Bloomberg, provided the headline today that home prices dropped 4%.  Classic right?  – There’s great news in the report, but the bold statement is negative.  On LinkedIn and Facebook, I posted the positive news and attached the entire S & P/Case-Shiller statement so people could read it for themselves.  While Gloomberg grabbed the year over year number as the headline, I instead focused on the report itself, which in its opening sentence reads as follows: “New York, June 28, 2011 – Data through April 2011, released today by S&P Indices for its S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices, the leading measure of U.S. home prices, show a monthly increase in prices for the 10- and 20-City Composites for the first time in eight months“.  Now I don’t know about you, but that sounds pretty dang positive to me.  At a time when good news proclamations seem far and few between and on a day when consumer confidence unexpectedly dipped 3%, I feel it only responsible to report the positive and not just the negative.  I could go on and on, but I’m meeting another seller in less than an hour, who feels like now could be a good time to list and sell, and I couldn’t agree more.