U.S. house prices rose 1.2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2013, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) House Price Index (HPI). This is the 10th consecutive quarterly price increase in the purchase-only, seasonally adjusted index.
The HPI is calculated using home sales price information from mortgages sold to, or guaranteed by, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Compared with last year, house prices rose 7.7 percent from the fourth quarter of 2012 to the fourth quarter of 2013. FHFA’s seasonally adjusted monthly index for December was up 0.8 percent from November.
FHFA’s expanded-data house price index, a metric that adds transaction information from county recorder offices and the FHA to the HPI data sample, rose 1.2 percent over the prior quarter. Over the last year, that index is up 7.8 percent. For individual states, price changes reflected in the expanded-data measure and the traditional purchase-only HPI are compared on pages 17-19 of this report.
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