ne portland home for sale sold
A recently sold home in Northeast Portland.
(Elliot Njus/The Oregonian)
The rapid home-price gains that were running strong through much of last year are cooling off in the Portland area and other major metro areas.
It's not that prices fell. Prices continue to rise, according to the Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller home price index released Tuesday. Across the 20 major metros included in the survey, prices rose 1.1 percent in April and 10.8 percent compared with a year earlier.
In Portland, prices were up 1.6 percent in April and 11.1 percent from a year ago.
But both locally and nationally they're increasing at a slower rate than they had been. The year-over-year increases in home prices have been losing momentum since December's numbers.
Nineteen of the 20 metros, including Portland, reported slower growth in April compared to the previous month's reading. Only Boston saw home prices growing more rapidly.
"Near-term economic factors favor further gains in housing," said David M. Blitzer, the index committee chairman. "However, housing is not back to normal."
Even so, last year's robust gains in prices and sales turned out to be unsustainable, especially as mortgage rates rebounded from historic lows and much of the surplus inventory of homes left over from the housing crash were sold.
This year, price have continued to rise, but the increases have slowed in what many market-watchers consider a stabilization. Warning signs like an excess of homes for sale haven't materialized -- in fact, most markets are seeing a shortage of inventory.
The Case-Shiller index uses repeat sales of the same home to estimate changes in the broader real estate market. It's widely watched by economists and investors as a reliable measure of home prices, but it's also a delayed picture because it uses a three-month rolling average and is released on a two-month delay.
April also brought the first improvement in home sales of 2014, up 1.3 percent on a seasonally adjusted, annualized basis. In May, home sales improved further to a 4.9 percent gain, the biggest one-month increase in three years.
-- Elliot Njus