Another Price Index Goes a Little Wobbly

The last of the May's four home price indices (HPI) that MND tracks, the version supplied by Black Knight Financial Services, was released on Monday.  Like the others, it shows accelerating price increases on a year-over-year basis, but indicated a small degree of softening in more recent data.

National home prices gained 6.1 percent in May when compared to the same month in 2016.  It was the fourth successive month that the annual rate of gain has grown - in April the increase was 6.0 percent.  May's appreciation brought the national index to another new peak, $278,000, and marked a 4.6 percent gain in home prices thus far in 2017.  However, on a month over month basis, the rate of appreciation slowed.  It was up 1.2 percent from March to April, but only 1.1 percent from April to May.

While the numbers are different, each of the other major indices, those from CoreLogic, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), and S&P CoreLogic Case-Schiller, have become a little wobbly in recent months.  FHFA and Case-Shiller both continue to post year-over-year increases but both, along with Black Knight, declined slightly from April to May. The CoreLogic HPI has now posted two annual declines as well as a 0.4 decrease in what remained very strong growth from April to May.  

Black Knight's national HPI in May was back to its pre-housing crisis peak.  Home prices rose in every state and the 40 largest metros increased in May and 11 of the 20 most most-populous states and 20 of the 40 largest metros hit new price peaks.

Rhode Island led all states in monthly gains at 1.7 percent; Utah, Idaho, Montana and Washington all followed at 1.6 percent.  Spokane and Carson City posted the highest monthly gain, 1.9 percent, among metropolitan areas.  Seattle home prices continued to lead the nation, they have gained by 10.3 percent in 2017 alone; San Jose, Calif., followed with 9.0 percent growth year-to-date
 
The Black Knight HPI utilizes repeat sales data from its public records data set as well as loan-level mortgage performance data to capture home price data from both disclosure and non-disclosure states.