Home price growth in the U.S. has slowed for the sixth month in a row, but residential real estate leaders say they see a brighter future for the housing market.
Though the cost of a single-family house increased 3.9% from a year earlier in September, the speed of that increase was lower than the month before, according to the latest S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price Index.
A second price index released Tuesday by the Federal Housing Finance Agency found a similar trend. Though house prices in the U.S. increased on an annual basis during the third quarter, that growth has cooled off.
That deceleration is a continuation of “a trend that started in the fourth quarter of the previous year," Anju Vajja, deputy director for the FHFAs division of research and statistics, said in a statement.
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The latest home price data comes as the housing market is showing the beginning signs of a recovery from a slowdown this fall. Mortgage rates have been trending upward in recent weeks, pricing some prospective homebuyers out of the market and keeping some prospective home sellers in place.
“While house prices continued to increase because housing demand outpaced the locked-in housing supply, elevated house prices and mortgage rates likely contributed to the slowdown in price growth,” Vajja said.
The price data released Tuesday lags behind current conditions. The report uses data from July, August and September, so it doesn’t fully account for recent shifts in the housing market and the economy at large. That means the data doesn’t account for October’s uptick in existing home sales and the growth in inventory.
Even as some analysts and economists have forecast that prices will stay high and growth will keep slowing for the foreseeable future, some leaders in the residential real estate world see a light at the end of the tunnel.
“Maybe we are turning the corner,” said Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors, last week.
Anthony Lamacchia, CEO and founder of Lamacchia Realty, told a room full of real estate agents earlier this month that he was calling a bottom in the market. “We are in the bottom of this slowdown,” he said.