US house price growth slows to 12-month low

A leading indicator of house prices in the United States showed that price inflation slowed to its lowest levels in a year in September.

The widely followed S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller 20-city home price index showed that prices were 4.6% higher than last September, down from the 5.2% annual gain in August.

The growth rate was the lowest since September 2023 and below the 4.9% increase expected by analysts.

New York continued to report the highest year-on-year increase in prices among the 20 metropolitan areas surveyed in September, with a 7.5% increase, followed by Cleveland and Chicago with gains of 7.1% and 6.9%, respectively. Denver posted the lowest year-on-year growth with 0.2%.

“Home price growth stalled in the third quarter, after a steady start to 2024,” says Brian Luke, head of commodities, real and digital assets at S&P Global. “The slight downtick could be attributed to technical factors as the seasonally adjusted figures boasted a 16th consecutive all-time high.

Prices in the Northeast and Midwest grew 5.7% and 5.4%, respectively, while the South reported its slowest growth in over a year at just 2.8% – "barely above current inflation levels", Luke highlighted.

Meanwhile, the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller national home price index, which covers all nine US census divisions, reported a 3.9% annual return for September, down from 4.3% in August.

In other news, a separate Housing Price Index released by the Federal Housing Finance Agency on Tuesday showed that annual national price growth over the third quarter as a whole slowed to 4.3%, from 5.9% in the second quarter.

While prices have increased year-on-year in every quarter since early-2012, this was the lowest rate of growth since the second quarter of 2023 and the second lowest in 10 years.