The predicted positive outlook for 2016’s Real Estate Market is already proving accurate. Both resale housing inventory and builder confidence are up, and home-buyer activity is significantly above average for the first month of 2016. A “normal” price increase for the market nationwide has historically been 5-7%.
Home prices nationwide, including distressed sales, increased year over year by 6.3 percent in December 2015 compared with December 2014, according to the recently released CoreLogic® Home Price Index (HPI™) and HPI Forecast™ data for December 2015. Results also showed that prices increased month over month by 0.8 percent in December 2015 compared with November 2015.
The CoreLogic HPI Forecast indicates that home prices will increase by 5.4 percent on a year-over-year basis from December 2015 to December 2016, and on a month-over-month basis home prices are expected to increase 0.2 percent from December 2015 to January 2016. The CoreLogic HPI Forecast is a projection of home prices using the CoreLogic HPI and other economic variables. Values are derived from state-level forecasts by weighting indices according to the number of owner-occupied households for each state.
“Nationally, home prices have been rising at a 5 to 6 percent annual rate for more than a year,” says Dr. Frank Nothaft, chief economist for CoreLogic. “However, local-market growth can vary substantially from that. Some metropolitan areas have had double-digit appreciation, such as Denver and Naples, Florida, while others have had price declines, like New Orleans and Rochester, New York.”
“Higher property valuations appear to be driving up single-family construction as we head into the spring. Additional housing stock, especially in urban centers on the coasts such as San Francisco, could help to temper home price growth in the longer term,” says Anand Nallathambi, president and CEO of CoreLogic. “In the short and medium term, local markets with strong employment growth are likely to experience a continued rise in home sales and price growth well above the U.S. average.”
For more information, visit www.corelogic.com.
Reprinted with permission from RISMedia. ©2016. All rights reserved.
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