One Price Index Shows Long-Expected Price Slowdown

Black Knight Financial Services released its Home Price Index (HPI) report for July on Monday and, unlike reports from CoreLogic and the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) reports for the month (the fourth report, the CoreLogic Case-Shiller indices is due out on Tuesday) it shows a distinct slowing in the pace of price appreciation over the past few months.

Black Knight reports its national index for July was $266,000.  This is 0.4 percent higher than its index for June and up 5.3 percent compared to August 2015.  The month over month increase in May was 1.1 percent, declining to 0.8 percent in June.  FHFA showed a pickup in the appreciation rate month-over-month and annually in both June and July while CoreLogic showed a 0.3 increase in the annual appreciation rate in July.

The national HPI is now less than 1 percent off of the peak of $268,000 reached in June 2006.  Prices have increased by 33.1 percent since they tumbled to a low of $200,0000 in January 2012.

Among the states, prices increased the most from June to July in New York at 1.1 percent and Minnesota at 1.0 percent.  The HPI for Utah grew by 0.9 percent while Rhode Island, Wisconsin, and Idaho all posted 0.8 percent gains.

Black Knight's HPI declined in only one state, Missouri, which was down 0.1 percent.  Nebraska, Virginia, North Carolina, and Maine rounded out the bottom five states for appreciation, each rising 0.1 percent.

 Black Knight's index covers nearly 90 percent of U.S. residential properties at ZIP Code level and uses repeat sales data from its public records data set and its loan-level performance data to capture home price information.