As I mentioned in a prior note, house prices may be dropping in ways that are not picked up by price indices because the indices all use the contracted sale price. Currently sellers are using a variety of kickbacks that reduce the effective price below the sale price.

Today’s Washington Post has a good example. Centex, a major national builder, has a full-page ad (sorry ads don’t appear in the web edition) offering mortgages at well below the market rate, plus closing cost assistance. (The difference on the 30-year is about 0.8 percentage points.) The ad also promises realtors a $5,000 bonus. So, on a $400,000 home, these incentives could easily come to 5 percent of the purchase price.

So the next article on housing prices that doesn’t mention kickbacks of this sort gets a special BTP goat prize.

–Dean Baker

Dean Baker is senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. He is the author of several books, including Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. Read more about Dean.