U.S. house prices rose in January, up 0.3% from the previous month, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) House Price Index (HPI), released Wednesday.
House prices rose 5.2% from January 2019 to January 2020. The previously reported 0.6% increase for December 2019 was revised upward to 0.7%.
For the nine census divisions, seasonally adjusted monthly house price changes from December 2019 to January 2020 ranged from -0.2% in the Mountain division to +0.7% in the South Atlantic divisions. The 12-month changes were all positive, ranging from +4.1% in the Middle Atlantic division to +6.4% in the South Atlantic division.
“U.S. house prices continued to increase at a moderate pace in January,” according to Dr. Lynn Fisher, deputy director of the Division of Research and Statistics at FHFA. “Transactions in January were unlikely to reflect much, if any, influence from the COVID-19 outbreak. House prices in the Pacific and South Atlantic regions grew somewhat faster over the year ending in January 2020 than observed the same time a year ago.”
