House prices rose nationwide in February, up 2.1% from the previous month, according to the latest Federal Housing Finance Agency House Price Index.
House prices rose 19.4% from February 2021 to February 2022. The previously reported 1.6% price change for January 2022 remained unchanged.
Those numbers are close to what the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Index determined. In a statement posted this morning, the index showed a 19.8% increase in February, the second month of accelerated growth after a winter lull and another month with the strongest annual increase since the beginning of the data series.
For the nine Census divisions, the FHFA index reported seasonally adjusted monthly house price changes from January 2022 to February 2022 ranged from +1.3% in the East North Central division to +2.9% in the South Atlantic division. The 12-month changes ranged from +15.3% in the East North Central division to +24.3% in the Mountain division.
“House prices rose to set a new historical record in February,” Will Doerner, Ph.D., supervisory economist in FHFA’s Division of Research and Statistics, said. “Acceleration approached twice the monthly rate as seen a year ago. Housing prices continue to rise owing in part to supply constraints.”
S&P reported price growth was robust across the country with all 20 metro areas seeing stronger annual gains than in January. Largest increases in annual gains were in the West Coast markets: Los Angeles, Seattle, San Diego, and San Francisco, and also in high-tier price segments.
“The macroeconomic environment is evolving rapidly and may not support extraordinary home price growth for much longer. The post-COVID resumption of general economic activity has stoked inflation, and the Federal Reserve has begun to increase interest rates in response. We may soon begin to see the impact of increasing mortgage rates on home prices," said Craig J. Lazzara, managing director at S&P DJI.
Phoenix, Tampa, and Miami reported the highest year-over-year gains among the 20 cities in February. Phoenix led the way with a 32.9% year-over-year price increase, followed by Tampa with a 32.6% increase and Miami with a 29.7% increase. All 20 cities reported higher price increase in the year ending February 2022 versus the year ending January 2022.
“While anticipation of mortgage rate increases pulled many buyers in ahead of the spring home buying season, strength in higher priced segments of the market also suggests that buyers are seeing additional value in homes as a hedge against inflation,” a CoreLogic spokesperson said.
The FHFA HPI is the nation's only collection of public, freely available house price indexes that measure changes in single-family home values based on data from all 50 states and over 400 American cities that extend back to the mid-1970s. The FHFA HPI incorporates tens of millions of home sales and offers insights about house price fluctuations 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.
The S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Indices are constructed to track the price path of typical single-family homes located in each metropolitan area provided. Each index combines matched price pairs for thousands of individual houses from the available universe of arms-length sales data.
