Home Price Growth Slows but Remains Robust

Staff Report From Georgia CEO

Thursday, October 17th, 2024

Single-family home prices increased 5.9 percent from Q3 2023 to Q3 2024, a deceleration compared to the previous quarter's downwardly revised annual growth rate of 6.4 percent, according to the latest reading of the Fannie Mae (OTCQB: FNMA) Home Price Index (FNM-HPI). The FNM-HPI is a national, repeat-transaction home price index measuring the average, quarterly price change for all single-family properties in the United States, excluding condos. On a quarterly basis, home prices rose a seasonally adjusted 1.3 percent in Q3 2024, down from the revised 1.4 percent growth in Q2 2024. On a non-seasonally adjusted basis, home prices increased by 0.9 percent in Q3 2024.

"Despite decelerating slightly, home price growth remained robust in the third quarter, as the supply of homes for sale, particularly on the existing side, remained weak relative to historical levels," said Mark Palim, Fannie Mae Senior Vice President and Chief Economist. "Even though mortgage rates fell precipitously in the third quarter, and we saw some improvements to the months' supply of homes for sale, home purchase activity barely budged – at least on a national basis – which we view as evidence that the market remains significantly constrained by both the 'lock-in effect' and affordability generally, but especially elevated home prices. In fact, consumers have told us as much: In September, high home prices supplanted high mortgage rates as the top reason for our survey respondents' overwhelming pessimism toward homebuying conditions. Overall, the strength of this latest home price reading confirms the ongoing challenges with tight supply; however, the index's continued deceleration shows that we're slowly moving toward a better balance between supply and demand."

The FNM-HPI is produced by aggregating county-level data to create both seasonally adjusted and non-seasonally adjusted national indices that are representative of the whole country and designed to serve as indicators of general single-family home price trends. The FNM-HPI is publicly available at the national level as a quarterly series with a start date of Q1 1975 and extending to the most recent quarter, Q3 2024. Fannie Mae publishes the FNM-HPI approximately mid-month during the first month of each new quarter.

For more information on the FNM-HPI, including a description of the methodology and the Q3 2024 data file, please visit our Research & Insights page on fanniemae.com.

To receive e-mail updates regarding future FNM-HPI updates and other housing market research from Fannie Mae's Economic & Strategic Research Group, please click here.