The April 2020 data is the latest available from Case-Shiller as I write this on June 30. The data is a 3-month moving average so what they call April is really the February-April average. Detroit data have NOT been updated for March & April yet.
Going into the COVID-19 crisis, the U.S. real estate market was crazy hot. Although the number of house sales tanked in many areas in April, house prices did not fall.
From April 2019 to April 2020, real, inflation-adjusted house prices increased for all metros covered by Case-Shiller. (Although, we don’t have April data for Detroit yet.)
Phoenix led the way with an 8% real house price increase over the previous 12 months! That’s 8% after inflation. That’s hot.
For the U.S. as a whole, real inflation-adjusted house prices were up 4% from a year earlier.
House Price Momentum
House prices continued to gain upward momentum in April. Prices increased more the last 12 months compared to the previous 12 months in 12 cities covered by Case-Shiller. Prices increased more slowly in only 2 metros.
Deflation!
This is weird but April saw a bit of deflation! Consumer prices fell a bit due to falling oil prices!
That little bit of deflation caused real, inflation-adjusted house prices to increase a little bit extra in April as you can see on the chart below.
Price Appreciation
Phoenix topped the charts with 12-month house (nominal) price appreciation of 9%.
Seattle was #2 with 7% appreciation. Seattle has been extremely erratic. It was the hottest market in the U.S. for a couple of years but then prices actually fell slightly year-over-year in 2019 and now Seattle is back near the top for house price appreciation!
Coming in with 6% annual appreciation were Minneapolis, Cleveland, San Diego, Tampa and Charlotte.
Last month I expected U.S. house price appreciation would fall because of the epidemic but now I don’t think so. If the recession continues, then next year prices could fall. Here’s a discussion of how incredibly hot the June market was been in Phoenix.
Note. You can find interactive versions of these charts for all 20 Case-Shiller metros here.
The interactive graphics on this page always show the most recent data available but the text here was written on June 30, 2020.
# # #