U.S. house prices rose in January, up 0.3 percent from the previous month, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) House Price Index (HPI). House prices rose 5.2 percent from January 2019 to January 2020. The previously reported 0.6 percent increase for December 2019 was revised upward to 0.7 percent.
For the nine census divisions, seasonally adjusted monthly house price changes from December 2019 to January 2020 ranged from -0.2 percent in the Mountain division to +0.7 percent in the South Atlantic divisions. The 12-month changes were all positive, ranging from +4.1 percent in the Middle Atlantic division to +6.4 percent in the South Atlantic division.
“U.S. house prices continued to increase at a moderate pace in January,” according to Dr. Lynn Fisher, Deputy Director of the Division of Research and Statistics at FHFA. “Transactions in January were unlikely to reflect much, if any, influence from the COVID-19 outbreak. House prices in the Pacific and South Atlantic regions grew somewhat faster over the year ending in January 2020 than observed the same time a year ago.”
FHFA produces the nation’s only public, freely available house price indexes (HPIs) that measure changes in single-family house prices based on data that cover all 50 states and over 400 American cities and extend back to the mid-1970s. The HPIs are built on tens of millions of home sales and offer insights about house price fluctuations at the national, census division, state, metro area, county, ZIP code, and census tract levels. The FHFA HPIs use a fully transparent methodology based upon a weighted, repeat-sales statistical technique to analyze transaction data from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. FHFA releases data and reports on a quarterly and monthly basis. The flagship FHFA HPI uses seasonally adjusted, purchase-only data, unless otherwise noted. Additional indexes are based on other data including refinances, FHA mortgages, and real property records. All the indexes can be downloaded from the FHFA website.
Monthly index values and appreciation rate estimates for recent periods are provided in the tables and graphs on the following pages. Downloadable data and HPI release dates for all of 2020 are available here: https://www.fhfa.gov/HPI.
The next HPI report will be released April 22, 2020 with monthly data through February 2020.