Home Prices See Largest Monthly Gain Since June 2013

Black Knight’s Data and Analytics division released its monthly Home Price Index (HPI) report today that is based on March 2015 residential real estate transactions, revealing that home prices have seen their largest monthly gain since 2013.

The index found that appreciation increased 33 percent in Q1 2015 over Q1 2014. The U.S. HPI rolled in at $245,000, just 8.4 percent off the peak of $268,000 in June 2006, a positive month-over-month change of 1.17 percent and a positive year-over-year change of 4.81 percent. The Bay Area and Colorado outperformed the rest of the country, overtaking the top ten largest monthly HPI changes in states and metro areas.

U.S. home prices were up 1.2 percent for March, increasing 4.8 percent on a year-over-year basis, according to the report. March saw the largest monthly gain in national home prices since June 2013. Another indication of March’s strong performance, even the 10 worst performing states and metro areas all saw flat to positive movement.

According to Black Knight, the HPI provides the financial industry accurate valuations available from an HPI that are competitive with AVMs in out-of-sample tests. It is also the most accurately timed home-price information available and detects market changes quicker than other HPIs

The HPI combines the company’s extensive property and loan-level databases to create a repeat sales analysis of home prices based on their transaction dates every month for each of more than 18,500 U.S. ZIP codes, defined by the White House Office of Management and Budget, the company says. The HPI represents the price of non-distressed sales including price discounts for REO and short sales. In this report, the value and appreciation of the HPI reported is calculated assuming the entire stock of properties within each geography.

View the complete Home Price Index at: BKFS.com