Wednesday, March 9, 2016

FHFA's Colorado Home Price Index up 9.5 Percent at end of 2015

According to the Federal Housing Finance Agency's "Expanded-Data" index, house prices were up 9.5 percent, year over year, during the fourth quarter of 2015 in Colorado. It was the lowest growth rate in four quarters, but still showed robust growth for what continues to be an upward trend in home prices for much of Colorado:


Overall, Colorado has seen growth rates of 8 to 10 percent for the past 13 quarters, although this doesn't quite match the growth experienced toward the end of the dot-com boom of the late 1990s. The YOY growth rate was 107. percent during the third quarter of 2015, and it was 9.4 percent during the fourth quarter of 2014.

Most of this was driven by growth in the metro Denver area and northern Colorado. Using the same index, we see that growth in the Denver-Aurora-Lakewood area showed a very similar pattern:

In this case, we see the pattern is the same although the growth rates are slightly stronger in metro Denver than for the state overall. This suggests less robust growth in the state outside the metro Denver area.

During the fourth quarter of 2015, the YOY growth rate was 11.8 percent. The growth rate was 13.2 percent during the third quarter of 2015, and 9.4 percent during the last quarter of 2014.

For now, there is no evidence of any significant softening in the market as of the end of last year. The most recent Case-Shiller home price data, for December 2015, showed little drop off from the 15-year highs that we've seen in that index in recent years.

 In a future post, we can look at FHFA index numbers for the smaller markets. For more information on the FHFA index, see here.