Discussion Paper

First Impressions Can Be Misleading: Revisions to House Price Changes


Abstract: An assiduous follower of the national house price charts that the New York Fed maintains on its web page may have noticed that we appear to be rewriting history as we update the charts every month. For example, last month we reported that the median twelve-month house price change across all counties for December 2012 was 3.68 percent. However, this month, we indicate that this same median change for December 2012 was instead 3.45 percent. Why the change? Was the earlier reported number a mistake that we simply corrected this month? If not, what explains the revision to the initial report?

Keywords: data revisions; housing; House prices;

JEL Classification: R3;

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Bibliographic Information

Provider: Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Part of Series: Liberty Street Economics

Publication Date: 2013-03-26

Number: 20130326