As of November 30, the Winans International Real Estate Index (WIREI)™ posted a decline of 8.8% through 2011 and confirms that housing is still in a severe bear market.

From an all-time record high of $296,000 set in March of 2007, the Winans International Real Estate Index (WIREI) declined 22% to $228,500. In fact, this 4 1/2-year real estate bear market is the worst price drop in new home prices since the 33% decline from 1939 to 1945.

“Since the WIREI posts results a month earlier than other real estate indexes, it is a leading indicator in showing the continued poor health of the housing market. Unfortunately, tight credit conditions and high inventory levels continue to keep pressure on home price appreciation. The next housing bull market is probably several years away.”

The Winans International Real Estate Index (symbol: WIREI)™ is the only index that measures U.S. home prices from 1830 to present and posts new housing data without a 2-month lag found with other popular real estate indexes.

Winans International also developed an international housing index, called Winans-Taylor International Real Estate Index (symbol: WTIREI), by gathering 37 years of new home data from 36 countries and developing an approach to effectively combine these global studies of new home prices into single dataset.

The long running debate amongst market researchers as to whether new home sales data collected by the U.S. government or existing home statistics as provided by The National Association of Realtors (NAR) provide the most reliable information on the housing market was finally decided this week. The NAR had to substantially revise downward, five years of existing home sales by 14.3% due to data collection errors; a data series the NAR website states is “the premier measurement of the residential real estate market.”

“This research failure is equal in magnitude to the agency rating debacle of 2008. It casts a dark cloud over all real estate studies and indices that use existing home sales data. It leaves The Winans International Real Estate Index (symbol: WIREI) as one of the few reliable gauges of the housing market since it exclusively uses new home data in its calculations.”

Historically, data on new home activity has been the most timely and accurate of real estate statistics. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, there have been reliable studies done on new home prices since 1830, and the U.S. Census Bureau has been providing accurate data on housing since 1962.

Wall Street has long struggled with how to index and analyze the housing market.

In 2005, Winans International tackled the problem by developing The Winans International Real Estate Index (symbol: WIREI) with a patent-pending approach to rescale and combine several well know studies of U.S. new home prices into a continuous dataset without the time lag, scaling and price gapping problems found in other housing indexes.

In 2011, Winans International developed a new, international housing index, called Winans-Taylor International Real Estate Index (symbol: WTIREI), by gathering 37 years of new home data from 36 countries and developing an approach to effectively combine these global studies of new home prices into single dataset.

Wall Street has long struggled with indexing and analyzing real estate as an international investment. Respected market researchers Ken Winans and Dr. Bryan Taylor tackled the problem by gathering the data from 36 countries and developing an approach to effectively combine these global studies of home prices into single data set without the time lag and scaling problems found in other real estate benchmarks.

The new index is called Winans-Taylor International Real Estate Index (symbol: WITIRE)

“This is the only index that tracks global housing prices since 1975. The benchmark has already revealed several important facts such as that global housing prices, as a whole, have grown faster than U.S. (24% vs. 16%) since 1975, and the WITIRE is near all-time highs while Winans International Real Estate Index (symbol: WIREI) shows U.S. housing prices are 4% below their 2006 year-end high.”