About Home Value Trail

Home Value Trail publishes the Federal Housing Finance Agency's house price index for 19,024 ZIP codes, 2,795 counties, 922 metropolitan and micropolitan areas and every state, together with the Census Bureau's building permit counts for 7,402 cities and permit-issuing places. Each area's index is drawn as one line from its first year to its last, with recessions shaded, and its one-, five-, ten- and twenty-year changes are set beside the same spans for its county, metro, state and the nation.

What it is for

Buyers and sellers, landlords, agents, relocating families and local reporters use the same federal files. FHFA publishes them as spreadsheets; this site adds the comparisons, the decade tables, the peak-to-low declines, the permit context and the plain explanations that the raw files do not offer.

What it leaves out

• Individual homes. The index measures average price change across repeat sales of the same properties; the site does not estimate, and cannot estimate, the value of any particular house.
• Advice. The site does not say where anyone should buy or sell, or where prices are heading. It reports what the index has done.
• Rankings that assign blame or praise. Areas are sorted by the size of an index change; that is a number, not a verdict.

Funding

Home Value Trail is an independent public-data reference site. It is free and funded by advertising that is clearly labelled. Advertisers have no influence over which areas appear or how their figures are presented. Sponsor placements on county pages, when present, are marked "Sponsored".

Updates and corrections

FHFA releases the quarterly indexes about two months after each quarter ends and the annual ZIP, county and metro indexes once a year; the Census Bureau releases permits monthly. The site is rebuilt from the current files on a schedule. If a figure here differs from FHFA's or the Census Bureau's own file, the agency file is authoritative; see corrections and the methodology.

Contact: contact page.