Washington Leads Home Prices Gains, While Arkansas has Lowest Gains

Black Knight Financial Services, a provider of integrated technology, data, and analytics solutions that facilitate and automate many of the business processes across the mortgage life cycle Data & Analytics division released its Home Price Index (HPI) today finding that U.S. home prices were up 1 percent for the month of April, rising 4.9 percent on a year-over-year basis.

The national level HPI is at $248,000 for April, just 7.6 percent off its June 2006 peak of $268,000, the report said.

Washington led gains among the states, seeing 2 percent month-over-month appreciation, while Michigan had the second-highest price gains at 1.7 percent. Colorado, Oregon, and Minnesota rounded out the top five states with the highest home price appreciations. Arkansas had the lowest price appreciation at 0.2 percent, while Florida had the second-lowest percentage at 0.4 percent. North Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia finished up the bottom five state with the lowest home price appreciations.

Black Knight uses its property and loan-level databases to produce a repeat sales analysis of home prices as of their transaction dates every month for each of more than 18,000 U.S. ZIP codes to come up with the HPI. The HPI represents the price of non-distressed sales by taking into account price discounts for REO and short sales.

Black Knight also said that the HPI report reviews five price levels along with REO discount rates for each ZIP code, which are used in the HPI calculations to correct for the impact on estimates of open-market prices. This level of detail is provided for three property groupings in every ZIP code including all residential properties, condominiums, and single-family housing, and home prices are available with or without seasonal adjustments.

BIGGEST MOVERS: STATES

Top 10

Washington 2.0 percent

Michigan 1.7 percent

Colorado 1.7 percent

Oregon 1.6 percent

Minnesota 1.3 percent

Dist. of Columbia 1.3 percent

Illinois 1.2 percent

Massachusetts 1.2 percent

Montana 1.2 percent

Tennessee 1.1 percent

Bottom 10

Ohio 0.7 percent

Hawaii 0.7 percent

Arizona 0.7 percent

Nevada 0.7 percent

Missouri 0.6 percent

Georgia 0.6 percent

Virginia 0.5 percent

North Carolina 0.5 percent

Florida 0.4 percent

Arkansas 0.2 percent

Click here to view the complete Black Knight Home Price Index report.