Earlier today, in its latest update looking at March home prices, Case Shiller pointed out that “home prices continue to appreciate across the country”, at just over 5%, a pace that has held since early 2015.
Once again that was an understatement: in 15 of 20 of the tracked metro areas, the pace of home appreciation over the past year was 5% or higher, or more than twice the pace of core inflation. And with rents continuing to soar across the country, in many cases at a double digit clip, not to mention exploding healthcare costs, one wonders just what the BLS “measures” with its monthly CPI update.
In any case, for those lucky Americans who can afford to own a house instead of being stuck renting the New Normal American dream (where they are prohibited from peddling fiction as their annual rent increases by 10% or more each year), here is the breakdown of the best and worst cities, if only from the perspective of price appreciation in the U.S.
To be sure, one can argue that the best places to buy a house is inverted from where the current appreciation is highest, since this is where housing is relatively undervalued.
At the top, with annual price increases of 10% (rounded up) to over 12%, we find the usual west coast (and thus closest to China) suspects for the second month: Portland, Seattle and Denver, with the cities closest to Vancouver not surprising continue to see Y/Y growth. What is surprising is that what until recently was a superstar in this category, San Francisco, has seen its annual price increase drop to just 6.5% from 9.3% in February.
On the other end once again are Cleveland, Washington and, the worst performer of all, New York.
via http://ift.tt/2bPsg7E Tyler Durden