Home Prices Moved Up Another 1.7% to Start the Year

Staff Report From Georgia CEO

Tuesday, April 23rd, 2024

Single-family home prices increased 7.4 percent from Q1 2023 to Q1 2024, up from the previous quarter's revised annual growth rate of 6.6 percent, according to Fannie Mae's (OTCQB: FNMA) latest Home Price Index (FNM-HPI) reading, 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 1.7 percent in Q1 2024, essentially the same as the growth in Q4 2023. On a non-seasonally adjusted basis, home prices also increased by 1.7 percent in Q1 2024.

"Home prices continued to rise in the first quarter as the housing market remained seriously supply constrained," said Doug Duncan, Fannie Mae Senior Vice President and Chief Economist. "The stabilization of mortgage rates in the 6.6 to 6.7 percent range in January helped to boost demand early in the first quarter, with existing home sales and mortgage applications both rising. Mortgage rates have trended upward again of late, but there is support for home prices in strong demographic demand from younger generations. We expect home sales to rise modestly this year as potential homebuyers appear to be acclimating to the higher-rate environment and, in some cases, may be less able to put off moving for life reasons."

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, Q1 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 Q1 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.