Deschutes County still one of hottest U.S. home markets (sort of)

Deschutes County (the Bend-Redmond Metro Area) is in a familiar spot, the top 20 fastest-rising house-price markets, in new federal figures out Thursday. But two other figures show just how high – and low – the High Desert real estate market has gone over a several-year period.

The metro area, defined as all of Deschutes County, came in No. 12 among all metro areas for 2015’s home-price appreciation, up 12.24 percent for the year, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

And it’s an even more stunning five-year figure, showing the county’s home prices jumped nearly 57 percent in the 2010-2015 period.

That tops anyone in that one-year Top 20 list, barely topping the 55 percent jump over five years in the San Francisco metro area, followed by the nearby San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metro area, at 51 percent.

But just review that Top 20 2015 housing markets list under another column — the fourth-quarter figure — and a much different picture emerges.

For the Bend-Redmond Metro Area, home prices barely budged in the last quarter of 2015, up just 0.16 percent. While the five-year figure is the biggest rise in that group of 20, the quarterly rate is the smallest.

Meanwhile, U.S. house prices rose 1.4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2015, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency House Price Index (HPI).

That’s the 18th straight quarterly price increase in the purchase-only, seasonally adjusted index. House prices rose 5.8 percent from the fourth quarter of 2014 to the fourth quarter of 2015. FHFA’s seasonally adjusted monthly index for December was up 0.4 percent from November.

The HPI is calculated using home sales price information from mortgages sold to, or guaranteed by, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

“Instability in financial markets did not seem to put much of a drag on home prices in the fourth quarter,” said FHFA Supervisory Economist Andrew Leventis.

“The fourth quarter 1.4 percent increase for the U.S. was in line with the extremely steady—but historically elevated—appreciation rates we have been observing for several years now,” Leventis said.

While the purchase-only HPI rose 5.8 percent in 2015, prices of other goods and services fell 0.8 percent. The inflation-adjusted price of homes rose approximately 6.7 percent over the past year.