[1]U.S home prices are up 4.6 percent from a year ago and New York state home prices have a new post housing crisis high, according to the Black Knight Financial [2] Home Price Index January 2015 Overview released today. U.S. home prices had a slight 0.1 percent increase from December 2014 to January 2015. However, prices are up over 20 percent from 2012, but still down 10 percent from the 2006 peak. The current national home price value is $241,000.
“This month’s data shows that the housing market continues to appreciate, albeit a bit slower than before,” said Raj Dosaj,Black Knight’s Senior Vice President of HPI and Behavioral Models for the company’s Data & Analytics division. Florida and other states with higher than average distressed inventory are lagging behind the country as a whole. Overall, the latest data translates to decent news for the U.S. economy.”
The New York metro area had an even higher increase that the overall state at 9.4 percent. San Jose, California home prices have once again hit a new peak. It leads U.S. metros with 1.3 percent month-over month and 11.3 percent year-over-year gains.
Florida home prices saw a monthly decline, as did prices in all of the state’s major metro areas. Many of the states metros remain about 30 percent below their pre-crisis peaks. Connecticut home prices also dropped, decreasing 1.1 percent year-over-year, making it the only one of the 20 largest states to see a yearly decline.
Of the states where home prices were hit worst by the crisis, California has made the strongest comeback. California is now down around 20 percent from its peak in May 2006, whereas other hard-hit states like Arizona, Nevada, and Florida remain 30 percent or more off their local peaks. After nearly two straight years of home price increases, Las Vegas saw home prices decline for the second consecutive month in January.
The Black Knight HPI combines the company’s property and loan-level databases to produce a repeat sales analysis of home prices as of their transaction dates every month for each of the more than 18,500 U.S. ZIP codes. The Black Knight HPI represents the price of non-distressed sales by taking into account price discounts for REO and short sales.