What’s Happening with Home Values?
The Federal Housing Finance Agency Home Price Index was just released showing that home prices increased the strongest in the Pacific region for the month of August, with an increase of 7.3%. For the annualized number, or for the largest increase of year over year gains, we see that the Mountain region is the strongest with an increase of 8.4%. Even though the mid-Atlantic region is showing the weakest increase in home prices amongst the other regions and a slight dip in August, the region is still up 4% year over year. This report focuses on single family homes and uses data and information provided by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Another housing report, called the New Home Sales report, was also recently released. This report measures the amount of newly constructed homes that have a contract for sale. The September report noted that new home sales decreased by 5.5% to 553k homes. When digging deeper into the report, we do see that builders have been busy because the new home supply has increased by 2.8% for September to 327k which is a year over year gain of 16.8%. With this amount of supply, we may see home prices slow in their appreciation because demand needs to catch up. This could be a great window of opportunity for home shoppers to make a move.
Sources:
http://bit.ly/2yzdquX
http://bit.ly/2q97ft7
By: Jon Iacono