Los Angeles, Orange counties No. 1 in U.S. home-price gains by this index
Want another reason for the high cost of local living?
By one widely-watched home-price benchmark, the strongest appreciation nationwide this century was in Los Angeles and Orange counties.
The S&P/Case-Shiller indexes are curious real estate yardsticks, invented by and named for two pioneering professors in housing economics. This benchmark is narrow in scope as it follows housing in just 20 large U.S. markets. Think of it as housing’s equivalent to the Dow Jones industrial index, the venerable Wall Street tracker of 30 publicly traded and well-known companies.
When I tossed S&P/Case-Shiller data into my trusty spreadsheet I learned prices in L.A.-O.C. have surged to a nation’s best 171 percent since January 2000. (Ahem, that includes the housing bubble bursting!) And these 21st-century gains easily topped a 105 percent gain for S&P/Case-Shiller’s composite index that tracks all 20 cities.
Oh, by the way: Cleveland was No. 20 at 17 percent (Yes, one-tenth of the L.A.-O.C. gain!) No Cleveland snickers, please.
S&P/Case-Shiller indexes also show L.A.-O.C. prices are among national pricing leaders in more recent times. The local index was up 7.5 percent last year (No. 4 out of 20) and rose 52 percent since 2012 (fifth-highest.) As a comparison, S&P/Case-Shiller’s 20-city composite was up 6.3 percent last year and up 40 percent in the past five years.
Looking at how the other 19 cities tracked by S&P/Case-Shiller have moved — since 2000, last year and past five years — clear patterns emerge:
First, the West Coast dominated rankings by performance this century.
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