U.S. house prices rose 1.1% from the second quarter to the third quarter of 2012 according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s (FHFA) seasonally adjusted purchase-only house price index (HPI). The HPI is calculated using home sales price information from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgages. Seasonally adjusted house prices rose 4.0% from the third quarter of 2011 to the third quarter of 2012. FHFA’s seasonally adjusted monthly index for September was up 0.2% from August.
“With significant growth in home prices during the quarter and a modest inventory of homes available for sale, house price movements in the third quarter were similar to what we observed in the spring,” said FHFA Principal Economist Andrew Leventis. “The past year has seen consistent price increases, but a number of factors continue to affect the recovery in home prices such as stagnant income growth, high unemployment levels, lingering uncertainty about the macroeconomy, and the large number of homes in the foreclosure pipeline.”
Here is a comparison of the HPI to Case-Shiller home prices.
Seasonally Adjusted HPI (blue line) to Seasonally Adjusted Case Shiller 20 Cities (red line) – all index to Jan 2005
Read the source report from the FHFA. Please note:
FHFA’s purchase-only and all-transactions HPI track average house price changes in repeat sales or refinancings on the same single-family properties. The purchase-only index is based on more than 6 million repeat sales transactions, while the all-transactions index includes more than 46 million repeat transactions. Both indexes are based on data obtained from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for mortgages originated over the past 37 years. This HPI report contains tables showing: 1) House price appreciation for the 50 states and Washington, D.C.; 2) House price appreciation by census division and for the U.S. as a whole; 3) A ranking of 304 MSAs and metropolitan divisions by house price appreciation; and 4) A list of one-year and five-year house price appreciation rates for MSAs not ranked.
