Bay Area home prices aren’t rising nearly as fast as they were a year ago, but that’s not to say that they have stagnated. Far from it.
Home prices in the San Francisco metro area in May — the latest monthly data available from the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices — were 15.4 percent higher than they were a year earlier, and 1.6 percent higher than they were in April, for the second-highest price increases in the U.S. both annually and monthly.
May’s year-over-year rise in Bay Area home prices is down significantly from the 24.5 percent gain recorded one year ago, but most of the nation’s major metro areas posted far weaker numbers. In fact, the composite increase among the 20 largest metro areas was just 9.3 percent annually and 1.1 percent monthly.
The only metro areas with bigger prices increases in May were Las Vegas, up 16.9 percent annually, and Tampa, Fla., up 1.8 percent monthly.
“Home prices rose at their slowest pace since February of last year,” David Blitzer, chairman of the Index Committee at S&P Dow Jones Indices, said in a statement accompanying the latest Case-Shiller results. On average, he said, U.S. metro areas posted price gains “well below expectations.”
Nationwide, price appreciation has slowed recently as real estate markets gradually return to normalcy after the recent recession and housing crisis. In the Bay Area, April and May were the only months where the pace of annual price appreciation dipped below 20 percent in more than a year.
A deeper dive into MLS data for shows that the median price of single-family homes rose, year-over-year, in eight of Pacific Union’s nine Bay Area regions in May.
Napa County saw a 21 percent jump in the median sales price, followed closely by a 20.5 percent rise in our Mid-Peninsula region. The only decrease was in our Sonoma Valley region, where the median price fell 8 percent.
(Image: Flickr/Bhautikjoshi)