April 23, 2019
COB Analyst Awarded for Predicting Housing Prices
Dr. James Kleckley, director of Professional Services and Research for ECU’s College of Business, has been awarded a Pulsenomics Crystal Ball Award (his third consecutive) for 2018 and the annual “Top-10 Rankings” for the Zillow Home Price Expectations Survey. The recognition honors experts whose past home price expectations proved to be the most accurate and reliable. For this survey compiled by Pulsenomics, all panelists use historical data provided by Zillow to forecast future home prices over five years.
The Zillow Home Price Expectations Survey contains price forecasts each quarter from approximately 100 business and research economists. Kleckley finished in the top 10 in 11 of the 11 ranking categories during 2018, including the second-best prediction for the latest one-year horizon (December 2017 to December 2018).
Over the years, Kleckley’s research has focused on home pricing, amongst other economic and market trends.
Since the housing recovery from March 2012 to December 2018, the U.S. home price average annual growth rate has averaged 6.2 percent. In the coming five years (January 2019 to December 2023), on average, the panel of experts expects the annual change in housing prices to be 3.2 percent. The optimistic quartile of panelists believe that the expected growth rate will be 5.1 percent. Kleckley is one of those optimists.
“U.S. Housing Prices has grown strongly in the past three years: 7.0 percent in 2016, 7.4 percent in 2017, and 7.6 percent in 2018,” said Kleckley. “I expect 2019 home pricing trends to fall modestly from 2018 but remain near 7.0 percent when the December 2018-2019 change is recorded.”
Note that these predictions are for overall U.S. prices, as measured by Zillow. Housing prices are local, so an individual home value will likely vary above or below this rate.
