Home Prices Show Biggest Rise in 6 Years

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Home Prices Show Biggest Rise in 6 Years
by Richard Davies - ABCNews
Feb 5, 2013

Home prices are accelerating in most local markets. CoreLogic, a real estate data provider, says average home prices rose 8.3 percent in December compared with a year earlier, the biggest annual gain since May 2006. Prices rose last year in 46 of 50 states.

Home prices also rose 0.4 percent in December from the previous month: a healthy increase given that sales usually slow over the winter months.

Steady increases in prices are helping fuel the housing recovery. They’re encouraging some people to sell homes and enticing some would-be buyers to purchase homes before prices rise further.

Higher prices can also make homeowners feel wealthier. That can encourage more consumer spending.

CoreLogic says January home prices, including distressed sales, are expected to rise by nearly 8 percent on a year-over year basis from January 2012, and fall by 1 percent compared with December, reflecting a seasonal winter slowdown.

Excluding distressed sales such as foreclosures and bank short sales, the average home price index is expected to rise more than 8.5 percent compared with the year before.

“December marked 10 consecutive months of year-over-year home price improvements, and the strongest growth since the height of the last housing boom,” says Mark Fleming, chief economist for CoreLogic. “We expect home price growth to continue in January.”

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Phoenix area home prices rise 34% in 2012
by Catherine Reagor
The Republic | azcentral.com
Feb 7, 2013

The median price of a metro Phoenix home climbed 34 percent in 2012. The rapid rise in home prices over the past 12 months means that many homeowners have regained more than one-half of the value their houses lost during the crash.

At the end of last year, the region’s median home price was $164,000, compared with $122,500 the year before.

Home prices climbed last year for two key reasons: Homes resold by lenders typically sell for lower prices, and foreclosures plummeted 51 percent in 2012 compared with 2011. Also, the supply of houses on the market fell 6 percent, according to a report released Thursday by Arizona State University’s W. P. Carey School of Business.

“Foreclosures and short sales have gone down, eliminating the sources of many cheap homes, so the more expensive types of transactions, like normal resales and new-home sales, went up,” said Mike Orr, director of the Center for Real Estate Theory and Practice at ASU.

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