House prices rose nationwide in February, up 2.1 percent from the previous month, according to the latest Federal Housing Finance Agency House Price Index (FHFA HPI®). House prices rose 19.4 percent from February 2021 to February 2022. The previously reported 1.6 percent price change for January 2022 remained unchanged.
For the nine census divisions, seasonally adjusted monthly house price changes from January 2022 to February 2022 ranged from +1.3 percent in the East North Central division to +2.9 percent in the South Atlantic division. The 12-month changes ranged from +15.3 percent in the East North Central division to +24.3 percent in the Mountain division.
“House prices rose to set a new historical record in February,” said Will Doerner, Ph.D., Supervisory Economist in FHFA’s Division of Research and Statistics. “Acceleration approached twice the monthly rate as seen a year ago. Housing prices continue to rise owing in part to supply constraints.”
The FHFA HPI is the nation’s only collection of public, freely available house price indexes that measure changes in single-family home values based on data from all 50 states and over 400 American cities that extend back to the mid-1970s. The FHFA HPI incorporates tens of millions of home sales and offers insights about house price fluctuations 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 on a quarterly and monthly basis. The flagship FHFA HPI uses nominal, seasonally adjusted, purchase-only data from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Additional indexes use other data including refinances, FHA 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 31, 2022, including data for the first quarter of 2022 and monthly data for March.