Home prices climbed 3.4 percent year-over-year in May, according to the latest S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price NSA Index, released Tuesday. The smaller appreciation follows a similar trend of slowing home price gains in recent months.
“Nationally, year-over-year home price gains were lower in May than in April, but not dramatically so and a broad-based moderation continued,” Philip Murphy, managing director and global head of index governance at S&P Dow Jones Indices. “Among 20 major U.S. city home price indices, the average year-over-year gain has been declining for the past year or so and now stands at the moderate nominal year-over-year rate of 3.1 percent.”
Annual home price gains came in at 3.5 percent year-over-year last month and were at 3.7 percent, the month before, according to historical data.
Annual gains were the highest in Las Vegas at 6.4 percent, Phoenix at 5.7 percent and Tampa at 5.1 percent. Only Seven of the 20 cities tracked by the index reported higher price increases in the year ending in May 2019 than the year ending in April 2019.
“Though home price gains seem generally sustainable for the time being, there are significant variations between year-over-year rates of change in individual cities,” Murphy said. “Seattle’s home price index is now 1.2 percent lower than it was in May 2018, the first negative year-over-year change recorded in a major city in a number of years.”
Murphy said it’s still too early to see if other cities will see year-over-year decreases, but there’s substantial diversity in local trends.
“Nationally, increasing housing supply points to somewhat weakened demand, but the fact that seven cities experienced stronger year-over-year price gains in May than they did in April suggests an underlying resiliency that may mitigate the risk of overshooting to the downside at the national level,” Murphy added.
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