National single-family home prices rise for the ninth straight month

Today’s letter is brought to you by Arrived!

Arrived makes it easy to buy shares of rental homes, allowing anyone to earn passive income and benefit from property value appreciation. Simply select from our wide selection of high-quality rental homes and invest anywhere between $100 and $20,000 in each property.

Arrived takes care of the management & operations, so you can sit back and build wealth. Arrived is backed by world class investors including Jeff Bezos & Marc Benioff.

Despite passing through a historic mortgage rate shock, which saw housing affordability deteriorate to levels unseen since the 1980s, existing home prices have proved fairly resilient.

This week, we learned that the October reading of the Case-Shiller National Home Price Index saw U.S. single-family home prices rise +0.2% on a month-over-month basis. That increase, which is about on par with normal fall seasonality, puts U.S. home prices up +6.3% year-to-date and +4.8% year-over-year. National home prices are +1.5% above last year’s peak hit in June 2022, while also +45.4% above March 2020.

Zoomed out, the latest +4.8% year-over-year reading is about on par with the average year-over-year reading since 1990 (+4.4%).

“Home price gains in the CoreLogic S&P Case-Shiller Index have increased by [about] 7% since the beginning of the year and are 1% higher than at the peak in 2022, recovering all losses recorded in the second half of 2022. In addition, given the stronger seasonal gains seen in early 2023, annual home price appreciation should accelerate this winter before slowing again next year. Still, most markets will continue to reach new home price highs over the course of 2024,” wrote Selma Hepp, chief economist at CoreLogic, in a statement published on Tuesday.

While national home prices, as tracked by Case-Shiller, rose for the ninth straight month, there’s still some regional weakness out there, along with some price tier bifurcation.

Case-Shiller only individually breaks out 20 metro-area housing markets. However, an index like the Zillow Home Value Index, which breaks out far more markets, show that many housing markets in Gulf states like Texas and Louisiana are still undergoing home price corrections.

ResiClub PRO members can access the Lance Lambert House Price Tracker to find greater detailed metro and county level data. Next week, ResiClub PRO members will also get a deep dive on ZIP code level house price analysis.

The ResiClub newsletter—and ResiClub PRO—remain on a limited holiday publishing schedule. We'll resume normal publishing on Monday, January 1st.