ARE HOME PRICES STILL ACCELERATING?
Yes. And we can look at this graph and see percent year over year price increases by month, going all the way back to 2021, to January of 2021. So if we look over on the left side, in January of ‘21 we saw 10% home price appreciation. So year over year, from January of 2020 to January of 2021, home prices increased by 10%. And then as you can see month over month, it really started to accelerate through the year. Now, when we hit the summer, you see July, August and so forth, it started to level out at about 18%. Very significant home price appreciation. But that’s when we started having the conversation, and we started hearing experts saying, are home prices going to decelerate? Meaning, continue to increase but just at a slower pace?
And the reality of it is, we saw that kind of 18% hold steady for a while. And then, into December and January of 2022, which we can see at the latest data we have, that green bar is showing that home prices are starting to tick back up. And that’s again a direct result of high buyer demand and low supply. So buyers are really competing for homes, and that’s causing home prices to tick up.
