Yeah, I saw that. They call it the First Time Buyer HAI, the FTB-HAI. With all their tweaking, this index is twice as high as the regular HAI. (Higher HAI means more people can afford a median priced home; a value of 100 means every resident can afford the median priced home). Voila, housing is more affordable than we all thought. Nothing to see here, just move along.
I would cut them a little slack if they would compute this index back to 2000, when the 10% or less down was getting popular. As it is, we’ve got HAI until 2005, and then a magical higher HAI starting in 2006. Twisted number crunching is what it is!