Home Prices Rise

In a report just released today by a private real estate data provider, US home prices were shown to have increased by 4.6% in August 2012 versus August 2011! This year over year increase marks the largest such increase in US home prices in more than six years!

Now, on a month-to-month basis. The same report showed that home prices rose 0.3% in August versus July. Though this was a small increase it’s still marked the sixth straight monthly gain in home prices. In this report.

Of the 100 cities that are tracked in this report, just 20 showed declines in the 12 month period ending in August.

“Again this month prices rose on a year-over-year basis and our expectation is for that to continue in September based on our pending HPI forecast,” said Mark Fleming, chief economist for CoreLogic. “The housing markets gains are increasingly geographically diverse with only six states continuing to show declining prices.”

“Sustained economic recovery in the U.S. requires a healthy housing market. You cannot have a healthy housing market without price stabilization and ultimately home price appreciation,” said Anand Nallathambi, president and CEO of CoreLogic. “Improving pricing trends over the past few months and our forecast for continued gains in September bode well for a progressive rebound in the residential housing market.”

Highlights as of August 2012:

• Including distressed sales, the five states with the highest home price appreciation were:  Arizona (+18.2 percent), Idaho (+10.4 percent), Nevada (+9.0 percent), Utah (+8.9 percent) and Hawaii (+8.0 percent).
• Including distressed sales, the five states with the greatest home price depreciation were: Rhode Island (-2.6 percent), Illinois (-2.3 percent), New Jersey (-1.4 percent), Alabama (-0.7 percent) and Connecticut (-0.5 percent).
• Excluding distressed sales, the five states with the highest home price appreciation were: Arizona (+13.0 percent), Utah (+10.0 percent), Montana (+8.8 percent), Idaho (+8.6 percent) and North Dakota (+7.7 percent).
• Excluding distressed sales, this month only three states posted home price depreciation: Rhode Island (-1.7 percent), New Jersey (-1.4 percent), Alabama (-0.2 percent).
• Including distressed transactions, the peak-to-current change in the national HPI (from April 2006 to August 2012) was -26.7 percent.  Excluding distressed transactions, the peak-to-current change in the HPI for the same period was -19.9 percent.
• The five states with the largest peak-to-current declines, including distressed transactions, are Nevada (-54.7 percent), Florida (-44.3 percent), Arizona (-42.0 percent), California (-37.7 percent) and Michigan (-36.5 percent).
• Of the top 100 Core Based Statistical Areas (CBSAs) measured by population, 20 are showing year-over-year declines in August, six fewer than in July.

Methodology

The CoreLogic HPI incorporates more than 30 years’ worth of repeat sales transactions, representing more than 65 million observations sourced from CoreLogic industry-leading property information and its securities and servicing databases. The CoreLogic HPI provides a multi-tier market evaluation based on price, time between sales, property type, loan type (conforming vs. nonconforming) and distressed sales. The CoreLogic HPI is a repeat-sales index that tracks increases and decreases in sales prices for the same homes over time, including single-family attached and single-family detached homes, which provides a more accurate “constant-quality” view of pricing trends than basing analysis on all home sales. The CoreLogic HPI provides the most comprehensive set of monthly home price indices available covering 6,768 ZIP codes (58 percent of total U.S. population), 620 Core Based Statistical Areas (86 percent of total U.S. population) and 1,183 counties (84 percent of total U.S. population) located in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Home Prices Rise

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