The Data & Analytics division of Black Knight Financial Services has introduced the Black Knight Index Suite, a series of indices designed to provide insights into the housing and mortgage markets.
The platform expands on the company’s existing Home Price Index (HPI) by adding three new indices: the Mortgage Market Index, Housing Market Index and a Home Listing Index. The Index Suite has been designed to provide objective benchmarks for measuring housing and mortgage market performance, and the indices can provide useful tools for economic forecasting, decision-making, risk management, research and modeling.
“Countless decisions are based upon assumptions around home prices, market ‘heat,’ origination volumes and prepayment and default activity,” says Julian Grey, mortgage market leader for Black Knight’s Data & Analytics division. “Vast personnel, time and capital resources have been expended answering some very core questions related to these assumptions. The Black Knight Index Suite eliminates a lot of that work, making analysts far more efficient and helping decision-makers across the enterprise base conclusions upon the collective intelligence of many terabytes of raw data – with trusted analytics making sense of it all.”
The Black Knight Index Suite comprises two sub-series: a Mortgage Market Index Series and a Housing Market Index Series. The Mortgage Market Index Series tracks changes in portfolio risk profiles via Mortgage Origination and Mortgage Performance Indices, each consisting of monthly time series measuring market and mortgage performance over the life cycle of a group of loans.
The Housing Market Indices include both an enhanced version of the Black Knight HPI and a forthcoming Home Listing Index (HLI). The enhanced HPI now includes support for 3-digit ZIP codes – the first three digits of a standard 5-digit ZIP code – for easier matching with Credit Risk Transfer data and Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae single-family mortgage performance data. It also includes views of historical monthly home price movements, HPI forecast scenarios and time coverage extending back to 1975. The forthcoming HLI will provide previously unavailable insights into the supply side of the housing market.