Elkin says the CPPI’s sub-indices, which measure quarterly pricing changes across regions as well as property types, fit in with the national results if you take the long view. “In looking at the sub-indices, there’s always a little more statistical noise,” he says. “So I tend to look at these on a longer timeline, because I feel that’s a little more accurate than period to period.”

For example, says Elkin, when measuring sector pricing in the top 10 MSAs, “over the course of a year you see a fairly narrow band of returns. Whereas the dispersion from quarter to quarter can be very high. Is it intuitive to think that the top markets can be down 15% to 20% while the national market is down 25%? Yes, I can believe that the primary markets would outperform the secondary and tertiary markets over the past year. We’re seeing things that make a lot of intuitive sense, which is encouraging.”

Elkin declines to provide a timeframe in which the industry can expect to see the monthly price fluctuations come to an end. “There are a lot of factors at play,” he says. “I don’t see the time element as the major driver of what direction this takes: whether prices rally or fall even further. Bigger drivers of that are regularity uncertainty, political uncertainty and macroeconomic factors. Those all weigh more heavily on investors’ decision-making.”

Further, Elkin notes there’s also the disparity in performance between healthy assets and distressed ones when it comes to pricing. The healthier properties are doing a far better job of holding onto their values, so it’s not merely a question of everything being down x percentage across the board, he says. “That has a significant impact when trying to determine fair price for sustained, stabilized assets.”