The Chicago Tribune looks at one way home values might stabilize: simply don’t include distressed home sales in the calculations and in appraisals.

A report from data provider CoreLogic showed that Chicago-area single-family home prices were relatively flat in February, down only 0.37 percent from a year ago. But that figure includes only traditional sales and not the impact of distressed-sales prices. Add in the sales of foreclosed, bank-owned homes and short sales, and Chicago-area home prices fell 10.4 percent in February on a year-over-year basis…

There’s one problem with Ford’s proposal, though. Appraisers are licensed by the state of Illinois but follow uniform federal guidelines that dictate that they analyze available comparable sales.

“It would lead to a misleading report,” said Chip Wagner of A.L. Wagner Appraisal Group Inc. in Naperville. “You can’t overlook any of the factors in the marketplace that are influencing factors. It sounds like a good idea in fairness to homeowners, but the appraisers that follow that would be in (danger) of losing their licenses.”

While this is being considered in a number of locations, it does seem that legislators would need to decide whether the benefits for homeowners outweigh the limitations.

Additionally, this sort of story might be good ammunition for those who are cynical about statistics: can’t you just change around a definition and say something very different (in this case, Chicago home sales have declined versus they have barely declined)? But at the same time, most statistics are dependent on their operationalization: whether home sale values should include the sales of distressed homes is more of a definitional issue and decisions about this would likely come down to vested interests and motivations.