U.S. house prices rose in January, up 0.2 percent from December, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) seasonally adjusted monthly House Price Index (HPI®). House prices rose 5.3 percent from January 2022 to January 2023. The previously reported 0.1 percent price decline in December 2022 remained unchanged.
For the nine census divisions, seasonally adjusted monthly price changes from December 2022 to January 2023 ranged from -0.6 percentin the Pacific division to +2.0 percent in the New England division. The 12-month changes were -1.5 percent in the Pacific division to +9.6 percent in the South Atlantic division.
“U.S. house prices changed slightly in January, continuing the trend of the last few months,” said Dr. Nataliya Polkovnichenko, Supervisory Economist, in FHFA’s Division of Research and Statistics. “Many of the January closings, on which this month’s HPI is constructed, reflect rate locks after mortgage rates declined from their peak in early November. Inventories of available homes for sale remained low.”
The FHFA HPI is a comprehensive collection of public, freely 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 April 25, 2023, including monthly data through February 2023.