Standard & Poor's is going to roll out 11 indexes tied to housing prices next month, The Wall Street Journal reports. Ten of the indexes will be based on prices in major cities and the 11th will be a composite.
Compiling information on prices and sales figures from a variety of public and private sources, including lenders and multiple-listing services, the data will be updated every month to track prices in Boston, Chicago, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Diego, San Francisco and Washington. The composite index will weight cities that have bigger populations and higher prices, such as New York, more heavily. All of the indexes will enable investors to go long or short.
The indexes will be named the S&P/Case-Shiller Metro Area Home Price Indices, named for calculation techniques developed by economics professors Karl Case and Robert Shiller.
"Obviously, all this talk about housing bubbles is going to enhance interest in the product," David Blitzer, chairman of S&P's index committee, told the Journal.
The staff of Money Management Executive ("MME") has prepared these capsule summaries based on reports published by the news sources to which they are attributed. Those news sources are not associated with MME, and have not prepared, sponsored, endorsed, or approved these summaries.
