A new way in which housing prices are reported each month will help make Calgary Realtors jobs easier in explaining market conditions to our clients.
The MLS® Housing Price Index (HPI) is coming to Calgary in February, as part of a nationwide rollout involving real estate boards in Canada’s largest cities. It’s an exciting new tool that the Calgary Real Estate Board has developed in cooperation with four other real estate boards and the Canadian Real Estate Association.
As you know, the average price in a market can vary widely from month to month, depending on volume shifts in various price segments. Reporting the average price can sometimes falsely exaggerate trends, causing confusion with our clients.
The MLS® HPI uses a new standard that takes into consideration such items as lot size, age of building, number of rooms and many more factors. It’s a way of comparing apples to apples, much as the Consumer Price Index uses a standard basket of goods to determine cost of living.
What does this mean to Sellers and REALTORS®? By using MLS® HPI, we will be able to offer more comprehensive and purer data than ever before – data you can use for property comparisons, understanding future price trends and estimating current market values. Most importantly, it brings more value to our clients.
The MLS® HPI is expected to become available early in February 2012. CREB® will be creating and updating a new MLS® HPI webpage on CREB®Link soon.
