This week S&P/Case-Shiller released their monthly Home Price Indices for January which showed that home prices increased 5.4%, year-over-year. In addition, their 10-City Composite is up slightly at 5.1% for the year and the 20-City Composite’s year-over-year gain is 5.7%.
“Home prices continue to climb at more than twice the rate of inflation,” says David M. Blitzer, Managing Director and Chairman of the Index Committee at S&P Dow Jones Indices. “The low inventory of homes for sale — currently about a five month supply – means that would-be sellers seeking to trade-up are having a hard time finding a new, larger home. The recovery of the sale and construction of new homes has lagged the gains seen in existing home sales. This may be starting to change: starts of single family homes in February were the highest since November 2007. The single-family-home share of total housing starts was 70% in February, up from a low of 57% in June 2015, and approaching the 75%-80% range seen before the housing crisis.”
The S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices are the leading measures of U.S. residential real estate prices, tracking changes in the value of residential real estate both nationally as well as in 20 metropolitan regions.
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