In its latest update looking at July home prices, Case Shiller pointed out that ” the housing sector continued to expand” at just around 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 top US cities with the highest and lowest home price appreciation.
At the top, with annual price increases of between 9% and 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 surprisingly continue to see the highest 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 6.0% from 9.3% in February.
On the other end once again are Cleveland, Washington and, the worst performer of all, New York.
Of course, one can debate whether the city with the fastest home price growth, in this case Portland, is “best”, for those who already own a house, or “worst”, for those who are trying to buy one and find it increasingly more unaffordable.
via http://ift.tt/2dFiB3S Tyler Durden