• calendar_month August 27, 2024
• folder Real Estate

Costs Remain Elevated, Even as Growth Slows, Economists Say

Single-family houses in Las Vegas had some of the fastest price growth in June. (Brian Rodriguez/CoStar)

Prices for existing single-family houses across the United States hit an all-time high for the fourth straight month.

The S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price NSA Index climbed 5.4% on an annual basis in June, according to the latest data. While it marks a historical high for the index, June’s data also marks the third consecutive month that the growth in prices has slowed, with prices gaining more gradually in the 12 months ended in June than in the year through May.

The index also includes 10-city and 20-city composites of major metropolitan markets. In June, both composites reported annual growth. It’s the fifth straight month that the national index and both composites grew on a monthly basis. But, like the national index, the composite measures saw slower growth in June than the previous month.

The indices “continue to show above-trend real price performance when accounting for inflation,” according to Brian D. Luke, head of commodities, real and digital assets at S&P Dow Jones Indices.

“While both housing and inflation have slowed, the gap between the two is larger than historical norms,” Luke said in a statement.

The latest home price data comes as residential housing professionals and economists are looking ahead to September and bracing for the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates for the first time since it began its campaign to slow inflation in 2022. It’s a move that has already started influencing the housing market as mortgage rates have eased in recent weeks.

But the price data released Tuesday arrives with a notable lag to current conditions. The report uses data from April, May and June, a time of mortgage rates peaking, then easing and the supply of housing beginning to rebound from its historic lows. Since then, mortgage rates have fallen even lower, and housing inventory has continued building. The effects of those changes have yet to appear in the measure of home price growth, but they could show up in future reports.

On a metropolitan area level, New York had the fastest annual growth in prices for the second month in a row, but similar to the larger measures, that growth decelerated in June. San Diego, Las Vegas and Los Angeles also had rapid price growth compared to other regions, each with a more than 8% increase in the price of a house compared to the same time a year earlier.

A second price index released Tuesday also indicated that housing price growth may be slowing. The Federal Housing Finance Agency’s House Price Index showed that between the second quarter of 2023 and the second quarter of 2024, house prices climbed 5.7%. At the same time, the agency’s seasonally adjusted monthly index declined 0.1% in June compared to the previous month.

“U.S. house prices saw the third consecutive slowdown in quarterly growth,” Anju Vajja, deputy director for the FHFA’s division of research and statistics, said in a statement. “The slower pace of appreciation as of June end was likely due to higher inventory of homes for sale and elevated mortgage rates.”