Single-family home prices clocked their 18th consecutive monthly all-time high but analysts say that growth is slowing. In one Central Florida hot spot, costs fell.
Home prices saw an annual gain of 3.8% in November, according to the latest reading of the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price Index. Although the index hit a new all-time high, it’s also the third month in a row that prices have increased less than 4% on an annual basis.
A separate home price index released Tuesday by the Federal Housing Finance Agency showed a similar trend. In November, prices grew just 0.3% compared to the previous month. On an annual basis, prices grew 4.2%. That slowdown was consistent across all nine regions measured by the FHFA index.
The updated home price data comes amid an influx of disruptors to the housing market. For one, it’s the start of the second week of the Trump administration 2.0. Already, the President Trump has signed a slew of executive orders and issued a memo directing the appropriate agencies to “drastically lower the cost of housing and expand housing supply.”
At the same time, mortgage rates have been on a tear in recent weeks, hovering near or above the 7% rate. But the price data released Tuesday lags behind current conditions. It uses data from September, October and November, and does not fully account for more recent shifts in the housing market and the economy at large.
The combination of having a new administration and conflicting trends such as mortgage rates increasing despite lower interest rates, has left economists and analysts uncertain, and in some cases pessimistic, about the future of the housing market and home prices in particular.
“Home prices remained mostly unchanged starting in late summer through the end of 2024, a trend that may continue into early months of 2025,” said Selma Hepp, chief economist at CoreLogic, in a statement. “Looking ahead, early housing market indicators suggest that 2025 spring home buying season may look very similar to 2024 — more inventory but also challenging affordability suggesting that home price appreciation will continue to slow.”
Regional variations
Experts have also suggested the slowdown in home price increases could show up differently across the country.
Earlier this month, researchers at mortgage giant Fannie Mae said they expect home price growth to slow down to 3.5% this year, down from 2024’s rate of 5.8%.
But, they noted, there will likely be variability in how that slowdown manifests across the county “due in part to regional differences in construction activity and the current supply of homes for sale,”
And those “regional differences” are already showing up in the data.
For example, while New York saw a 7.3% annual increase in home prices in November, home prices in Tampa, Florida, fell 0.4%. That marks the first annual drop in any market in over a year, according to the Case-Shiller index.
“With the exception of pockets of above-trend performance, national home prices are trending below historical averages,” Brian Luke, head of commodities at S&P Global Indices, said in a statement Tuesday. “Markets out west and in once red-hot Florida are trending well below average growth.”