U.S. House Prices Experience Moderate Rise, FHFA Index Reveals

The latest Federal Housing Finance Agency’s House Price Index (HPI) released today found U.S. house prices witnessed a modest rise of 0.7% in May compared to April. The HPI, which is seasonally adjusted, further reveals a year-over-year increase of 2.8% from May 2022 to May 2023.

Across the nine census divisions, the seasonally adjusted monthly price changes from April to May 2023 ranged from a decline of 0.5% in New England to a notable rise of 1.7% in the Pacific division. The 12-month changes were quite variable as well, with the Mountain division showing a decrease of 2.7% while the East North Central division enjoyed a robust growth of 5.5%.

“U.S. house prices increased moderately in May, continuing the trend of the last few months,” said Dr. Nataliya Polkovnichenko, supervisory economist in FHFA’s Division of Research and Statistics. “However, house prices in some regions of the country remained below the levels seen one year ago.”

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. 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.