With today’s release of the August S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index, we learned that seasonally adjusted home prices for the benchmark 20-city index were up 0.5% month over month. The seasonally adjusted national index year-over-year change has hovered between 4.2% and 6.1% for the last twenty-nine months. Today’s S&P/Case-Shiller National Home Price Index (nominal) reached another new high.
The adjacent column chart illustrates the month-over-month change in the seasonally adjusted 20-city index, which tends to be the most closely watched of the Case-Shiller series. It was up 0.5% from the previous month. The nonseasonally adjusted index was up 5.9% year-over-year.
Investing.com had forecast a 0.3% MoM seasonally adjusted increase and 6.0% YoY nonseasonally adjusted for the 20-city series.
Here is an excerpt of the analysis from today’s Standard & Poor’s press release.
“Home price increases appear to be unstoppable,” says David M. Blitzer, Managing Director and Chairman of the Index Committee at S&P Dow Jones Indices. “August saw the National Index annual rate tick up to 6.1%; all 20 cities followed in the report were up year-over-year while one, Atlanta, saw the seasonally adjusted monthly number slip 0.2%. Most prices across the rest of the economy are barely moving compared to housing. Over the last year the consumer price index rose 2.2%, driven largely by energy costs. Aside from oil, the only other major item with price gains close to housing was hospital services, which were up 4.6%. Wages climbed 3.6% in the year to August. [Link to source]
The chart below is an overlay of the Case-Shiller 10- and 20-City Composite Indexes along with the national index since 1987, the first year that the 10-City Composite was tracked. Note that the 20-City, which is probably the most closely watched of the three, dates from 2000. We’ve used the seasonally adjusted data for this illustration.
