Home prices continue steady climb in Utah

If you’re holding on to that home, hoping for the value to keep going up, the most recent home price report from property information and analytics provider CoreLogic has good news for you. The CoreLogic Home Price Index (HPI) for the Wasatch Front showed a 2.2 percent increase from May to June — twice the nationwide hike of 1.1 percent.

That means home prices are now 11.4 percent ahead of last year at this time. Across the U.S., prices are up 6.7 percent for the same period. All of the sales prices reported by CoreLogic include distressed sales such as foreclosures and short sales.

Looking ahead, the CoreLogic HPI Forecast predicts that U.S. home prices will increase by 5.2 percent on a year-over-year basis from this June to June 2018, and on a month-over-month basis home prices are expected to increase by 0.6 percent from June to July. The CoreLogic HPI Forecast is a projection of home prices using the CoreLogic HPI and other economic variables. Values are derived from state-level forecasts by weighting indices according to the number of owner-occupied households for each state.

“The growth in sales is slowing down and this is not due to lack of affordability, but rather a lack of inventory,” said Frank Nothaft, chief economist for CoreLogic. “As of Q2 2017, the unsold inventory as a share of all households is 1.9 percent, which is the lowest Q2 reading in over 30 years.”

“Home prices are marching ever higher, up almost 50 percent since the trough in March 2011. With no end to the escalation in sight, affordability is rapidly deteriorating nationally and especially in some key markets such as Denver, Houston, Miami and Washington,” said Frank Martell, president and CEO of CoreLogic. “While low mortgage rates are keeping the market affordable from a monthly payment perspective, affordability will likely become a much bigger challenge in the years ahead until the industry resolves the housing supply challenge.”