Home Price Appreciation Nears 9 Percent
Top heavy with fast-appreciating California cities, the Office of Federal
Housing Enterprise Oversight's Home Price Index reveals home price appreciation
virtually everywhere with only a few exceptions during the first quarter 2001.
By Broderick Perkins
DeadlineNews.Com
A dozen California metro areas yielded the nation's highest rates of home price appreciation in the latest Home Price Index tallied every quarter by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight.
It also was a very good year of appreciation for the nation as a whole. Only a handful of metro areas revealed negative appreciation rates.
The index's top 12 ranked metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) enjoyed home price appreciation rates ranging from 16.2 for No. 12 ranked Yolo (County), CA, a small basin region near Sacramento, to 27.4 percent for the No. 1 rated beach and agricultural metro of Santa Cruz-Watsonville, CA, just 30 miles south of Silicon Valley. The appreciation rates are for a one-year period from the first quarter 2000 to the first quarter 2001.
Other California metro areas in the top dozen slots were No. 2, San Jose (Silicon Valley); No. 3, Santa Rosa and No. 4, Salinas, all at 21.4 percent; No. 5, Stockton-Lodi, 21 percent; No. 6, Oakland, 20.2 percent; No. 7, Modesto, 20.1 percent; No. 8, San Francisco, 18.6 percent; No. 9, Vallejo-Fairfield-Napa, 17.9 percent; No. 10, San Luis Obispo-Paso Robles, 17.3 percent and No. 11, Sacramento was a 16.7 percent rate of home price appreciation from the first quarter 2000 to the same period this year.
Nationwide prices appreciated an average 8.8 percent. Across regions rates of appreciation ranged from 6.1 percent to 12.4 percent. State returns revealed price appreciation ranging from 3 percent to 15.4 percent.
OFHEO (pronounced "oh-FAY-oh") is Fannie Mae's and Freddie Mac's federal regulator and it bases its index on Freddie and Fannie mortgage data from repeat sales or refinances of the same homes in MSAs with at least 15,000 transactions. The data is available for hundreds of MSAs, individual states, geographic regions and the nation.
The index doesn't show actual home prices or provide comparisons, say of home prices in one city with home prices in others. The index, instead, is more of a DOW Jones average for local home prices. It reveals price changes as appreciation or depreciation.
In unranked statistical areas, only Merced, CA, with a 24 percent rate of appreciation, Utica-Rome, NY at 18.1 percent and Gainesville, FL at 17.4 percent had appreciation rates as high as the California Dozen.
Unranked statistical areas meet OFHEO's minimum criteria for inclusion, but indices for those areas are more variable and not as accurate because of a smaller sample sizes of repeat sales, according to OFHEO.
At the bottom of the heap of ranked MSAs were Harrisburg-Lebanon-Carlisle, PA, at 3.2 percent; Springfield, IL, and Reading, PA, 3.1 percent; Janesville-Beloit, WI, 2.4 percent, and last and least, Lafayette, IN at 2.3 percent.
A few unranked metros also revealed price depreciation. They were Parkersburg-Marietta, WV-OH, -2.2 percent; Jonesboro, AR, -2.8 percent; Wichita Falls, TX, -3.3 percent and Casper, WY, -3.7 percent.
By geographic census region New England revealed the greatest first quarter 2000-to-2001 price appreciation at 12.4 percent, closely followed by Pacific, 12.3 percent; Middle Atlantic, 9.2 percent; Mountain, 8.8 percent; South Atlantic, 8.5 percent; West North Central, 7.9 percent; West South Central 7.1 percent; East South Central, 6.5 percent and East North Central 6.1 percent.
The top three five states, including the District of Columbia, were Washington, D.C., 15.4 percent; California, 14.7 percent; New Hampshire, 13.6 percent, Massachusetts, 13.2 percent and Colorado at 12.1 percent. The bottom five states were, Alaska and Idaho at 4.8 percent, Nebraska, 4.7 percent; New Mexico, 4.6 percent and Wyoming, 3 percent. |
