U.S. house prices rose in August, up 0.6 percent from July, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) seasonally adjusted monthly House Price Index (HPI®). House prices rose 5.6 percent from August 2022 to August 2023. The previously reported 0.8 percent price increase in July remained unchanged.
For the nine census divisions, seasonally adjusted monthly price changes from July 2023 to August 2023 ranged from -0.2 percent in the South Atlantic division to +1.1 percent in the Pacific and East North Central divisions. The 12-month changes ranged from +2.4 percentin the Mountain division to +8.6 percent in the Middle Atlantic division.
“U.S. and regional house price gains remained strong over the last 12 months.” said Dr. Nataliya Polkovnichenko, Supervisory Economist in FHFA’s Division of Research and Statistics. “The South Atlantic division showed moderate weakness in August, while the remaining census divisions posted positive price appreciation from the previous month.”
The FHFA HPI is a comprehensive collection of publicly available house price indexes that measure changes in single-family home values based on data that extend back to the mid-1970s from all 50 states and over 400 American cities. It incorporates tens of millions of home sales and offers insights about house price changes at the national, census division, state, metro area, county, ZIP code, and census tract levels. FHFA uses a fully transparent methodology based upon a weighted, repeat-sales statistical technique to analyze house price transaction data.
FHFA releases HPI data and reports quarterly and monthly. The flagship FHFA HPI uses seasonally adjusted, purchase-only data from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Additional indexes use other data including refinances, Federal Housing Administration mortgages, and real property records. All the indexes, including their historic values, and information about future HPI release dates, are available on FHFA’s website: https://www.fhfa.gov/HPI.
FHFA will release its next HPI report on November 28, 2023, including data through September and the third quarter of 2023.