U.S. house prices rose in February, up 0.5 percent from January, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) seasonally adjusted monthly House Price Index (HPI®). House prices rose 4.0 percent from February 2022 to February 2023. The previously reported 0.2 percent price increase for January 2023 was revised downward to a 0.1 percent increase.
For the nine census divisions, seasonally adjusted monthly price changes from January 2023 to February 2023 ranged from -0.4 percentin the South Atlantic division to +2.3 percent in the East South Central division. The 12-month changes were -2.7 percent in the Pacific division to +8.3 percent in the East South Central division.
“U.S. house prices increased slightly in February,” said Dr. Nataliya Polkovnichenko, Supervisory Economist, in FHFA’s Division of Research and Statistics. “This increase was, in part, due to a decline in mortgage rates by more than half a percentage point from the peak reached in early November as well as historically low housing inventory.”
The FHFA HPI is a comprehensive collection of public, freely available house price indexes that measure changes in single-family home values based on data that extend back to the mid-1970s from all 50 states and over 400 American cities. It incorporates tens of millions of home sales and offers insights about house price changes at the national, census division, state, metro area, county, ZIP code, and census tract levels. FHFA uses a fully transparent methodology based upon a weighted, repeat-sales statistical technique to analyze house price transaction data.
FHFA releases HPI data and reports quarterly and monthly. The flagship FHFA HPI uses seasonally adjusted, purchase-only data from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Additional indexes use other data including refinances, Federal Housing Administration mortgages, and real property records. All the indexes, including their historic values, and information about future HPI release dates, are available on FHFA’s website: https://www.fhfa.gov/HPI.
FHFA will release its next HPI report on May 30, 2023, including data through the first quarter of 2023 and monthly data through March.