Those of you who can't get enough of housing-market data will be delighted to hear that not one but two major indexes of housing prices are out this morning.

The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight's house price index, which you can find HERE, shows prices rising slightly in the Baltimore metro area -- just under 2 percent -- in the final three months of 2007 vs. the same period a year earlier. Prices in the Washington area, by contrast, fell almost 3 percent.

Standard & Poor's Case-Shiller index, also released today and available HERE, shows much bigger price drops in the metro areas it tracks. Washington, which is as close to Baltimore as Case-Shiller lets us get, dropped 9.4 percent from December 2006 through December 2007 -- not as steep as the worst-hit areas, such as Miami and Los Angeles, but not one of the better performances, either.

Why the big difference?

Both measures attempt to weed out apples-to-orange comparisons by tracking the values of the same houses over time, but they're not measuring exactly the same thing. OFHEO's index tracks only the so-called "conforming" mortgages financed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which cuts out pricey jumbo loans and almost all subprime mortgages. Also, OFHEO's main index includes refinancing as well as sales.