Home Prices Rise 1.1 percent in Q3

U.S. house prices rose 1.1 percent in the third quarter compared with the second quarter, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s (FHFA) seasonally adjusted purchase-only house price index (HPI). The HPI is calculated using home sales price information from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgages. Seasonally adjusted house prices rose 4 percent year over year. FHFA’s seasonally adjusted monthly index for September was up 0.2 percent from August.
 
FHFA’s expanded-data house price index, a metric introduced in August 2011 that adds transactions information from county recorder offices and the Federal Housing Administration to the HPI data sample, rose 1.0 percent over the latest quarter. Over the latest four quarters, the index is up 3.3 percent. For individual states, price changes reflected in the expanded-data measure and the traditional purchase-only HPI are compared on pages 21-23 of this report.

While the national, purchase-only house price index rose 4 percent from the third quarter of 2011 to the third quarter of 2012, prices of other goods and services rose 1.5 percent over the same period. Accordingly, the inflation-adjusted price of homes rose approximately 2.5 percent over the latest