U.S. house prices rose in April, up 0.7 percent from March, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) seasonally adjusted monthly House Price Index (HPI®). House prices rose 3.1 percent from April 2022 to April 2023. The previously reported 0.6 percent increase in March was revised downward to 0.5 percent.
For the nine census divisions, seasonally adjusted monthly price changes from March 2023 to April 2023 ranged from +0.1 percent in the Pacific division to +2.4 percent in the New England division. The 12-month changes ranged from -3.8 percent in the Pacific division to +6.1 percent in the East South Central division.
“U.S. house prices generally increased moderately in April,” said Dr. Nataliya Polkovnichenko, Supervisory Economist in FHFA’s Division of Research and Statistics. “However, on a year-over-year basis, house prices in some regions of the country continued to decline.”
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 July 25, 2023, including data through May.