FHFA All-Transactions House Price Index Posts 6.3% Year-Over-Year Increase in Q1

According to the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s (FHFA) all-transactions House Price Index (HPI), with additional analysis provided by the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), US house prices increased 6.3% between 2023Q1 and Q1. Nationally, house prices have experienced positive annual appreciation for each quarter since 2012Q3.

The quarterly FHFA HPI not only reports house prices at the national level, but it also provides insights about house price fluctuations at the state and metro area levels. The FHFA HPI used by the NAHB’s review is the all-transactions index, measuring average price changes in repeat sales or refinancings on the same single-family properties.

Over the past four years, house prices have increased dramatically and are much higher than they were before the pandemic. Nationally, house prices rose 47.7% between 2020Q1 and Q1. At the state level, Florida led the way with the highest price appreciation—up 67.0%, due to strong population growth and limited housing supply. It was followed by Maine with a 63.6% gain and Tennessee with a 61.7% gain. Meanwhile, the District of Columbia had the lowest price growth—up only 14.6%, as people moved away from the high-density areas and toward more affordable suburbs.

The FHFA also points outs that house prices have changed unevenly across US metro areas since 2020Q1, with price appreciation ranging from 12.2% to 81.1%. More than half of the metro areas saw house prices rise by more than the national price growth rate of 47.7%. House prices in the South and the West have grown faster than the prices in the Midwest and Northeast. Within the top 20 metro areas that had the highest house price appreciation, 13 metro areas are located in the South Atlantic Division and four in the East South-Central Division, while none of them were in the Midwest.