As noted in an earlier post Harrisburg is not one of the twenty metro areas in the S&P/Case-Shiller Index. Presumably its small size would make it difficult to collect a sufficient number of repeat sales to have a statistically significant sample size without either extending the collection period and/or expanding the metro area, both of which would make the resulting index less useful to someone selling homes in Harrisburg.
Therefore, in small metro areas, such as Harrisburg, PA, the multi-list is typically the best (or only) source of housing market statistics. My local multi-list, the Central PA Multi-List, publishes mean (average) and median house prices quarterly.
The historical residential sales figures I have collected date back to 1991. The statistics reported in 1991 were rudimentary—units sold, sales volume, and average price. Gradually the Central PA Multi-List added more statistics—average days on market, number of active listings, median sale price, and breakdowns by county and price range. Today a motivated real estate wonk can download the entire multi-list database to Excel and analyze to his/her heart’s content.
For reasons never made clear (to me anyways) the Central PA Multi-List based all its sales statistics through 2006 on settled and pending (under contract) properties in any quarter or year, presumably using the list price of pending properties. Inclusion of pending properties doesn’t make sense as a) actual sale price is historically 97% of the list price at the time a property goes under contract, and b) some deals fall through. All of which suggests that pending properties would tend to artificially inflate the average and median house price figures. Curiously, when the Central PA Multi-List recomputed sales statistics for the years 2002 through 2006 without pending properties, the average and median increased--go figure!
The chart above shows trendlines for Harrisburg housing sales from 1991 to present. The old-style average sale price (including pending sales) is the blue line from 1991 to 2006. The new-style average sale price (excluding pending sales) is the red line from 2002 to 2009. Note slight discrepancy between the two sets of average sale prices in the overlap years 2002 to 2006.
The Central PA Multi-List has only published the median sale price from 2002 to the present. I have previously argued the median is more useful than the average as a measure of "typicalness" for housing. Here it is displayed as the green line from 2002 to present. All median house prices exclude pending sales (thankfully). The new-style average and new-style median trendlines closely follow each other separated by about $25,000.
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