This article was originally written by Doug Short. From 2016-2022, it was improved upon and updated by Jill Mislinski. Starting in January 2023, AP Charts pages will be maintained by Jennifer Nash at Advisor Perspectives/VettaFi.
The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) has released its U.S. house price index (HPI) for January. U.S. house prices increased by 0.2% from the previous month. Year-over-year the index is up 5.3% on a non-seasonally adjusted nominal basis. After adjusting for inflation and seasonality, the real index is down 0.2% in January and down 0.3% year-over-year (seasonally adjusted).
Here is the opening of the press release:
Washington, D.C. – U.S. house prices rose in January, up 0.2 percent from December, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) seasonally adjusted monthly House Price Index (HPI®). House prices rose 5.3 percent from January 2022 to January 2023. The previously reported 0.1 percent price decline in December 2022 remained unchanged.
“U.S. house prices changed slightly in January, continuing the trend of the last few months,” said Dr. Nataliya Polkovnichenko, Supervisory Economist, in FHFA’s Division of Research and Statistics. “Many of the January closings, on which this month’s HPI is constructed, reflect rate locks after mortgage rates declined from their peak in early November. Inventories of available homes for sale remained low.”
The House Price Index is a measure of the change in prices of single-family homes, using data from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It helps to analyze the strength of the US housing market by watching the rise and fall of prices. As prices increase so does consumer confidence. Conversely, as prices decrease, consumer confidence declines as well.
The chart below illustrates the monthly HPI series, which is not adjusted for inflation, along with a real (inflation-adjusted) series using the Consumer Price Index: All Items Less Shelter.
In the chart above we see that the nominal HPI index has exceeded its pre-recession peak of what's generally regarded to have been a housing bubble.
The next chart shows the growth of the nominal and real index since the turn of the century.
For an interesting comparison, let's overlay the HPI and the most closely matching sub-component of the CPI, owners' equivalent rent of residences (OER). OER measures how much monthly rent that would have to be paid in order to substitute a currently owned house as a rental property.
HPI and OER moved in close parallel from the 1991 inception date of the former until early 1999, when the two parted company and HPI began accelerating into the housing bubble. HPI then fell 21.2% over the next 48 months to its 2011-2012 trough. Confirmation of the "bubble" designation for house prices is the 39.3% spread between HPI and OER in January 2006.
Are we in another housing bubble? The current spread is 53.6%, exceeding the "bubble designation" just mentioned. This is just below its all-time peak of 63.3% which occurred in May 2022.
Here we compare the CPI for all urban consumers to both the nominal and real house price index, which is a similar comparison to what I do in our Case-Shiller update. Nominal HPI growth has clearly taken off since 2012. However, when adjusted for inflation, the house price index has been increasing at a much slower rate.
ETFs associated with residential real-estate include: iShares Residential and Multisector Real Estate ETF (REZ).
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