Bend-area home-prices jump 8th-fastest in nation
Bend-area (Deschutes County) home prices continue to rise at a pace that puts the area in the top 10 of the nation, new federal statistics released Tuesday show.
The Bend-Redmond Metro Area, defined as all of the county, saw its house prices rise about 19 percent in the year ended June 30 th , No. 8 on the list from the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
Modesto, Calif., tops the list, at one-year price appreciation of about 25 percent. No other Northwest cities made the top 20 in the latest list, though 15 of the top 20 are in California.
The Bend area saw its home prices rise 4.61 percent in the second quarter of the year and 7.25 percent over a five-year period, the agency said.
The agency said U.S. house prices rose 0.8 percent in the second quarter of 2014, according to its purchase-only, seasonally adjusted House Price Index (HPI). This is the twelfth consecutive quarterly price increase in the HPI.
The FHFA HPI is calculated using home sales price information from mortgages sold to, or guaranteed by, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Compared with last year, house prices rose 5.2 percent from the second quarter of 2013 to the second quarter of 2014. FHFA’s seasonally adjusted monthly index for June was up 0.4 percent from May, marking seven consecutive monthly increases.
“The extraordinary price appreciation observed over the last few spring seasons was not evident in the second quarter of this year. However, house price appreciation for the nation as a whole remained positive,” said FHFA Principal Economist Andrew Leventis. “FHFA’s data indicate that house price appreciation in the quarter was near or below the baseline rate of inflation in most states.”
FHFA’s expanded-data house price index, a metric that adds transaction information from county recorder offices and the Federal Housing Administration to the HPI data sample, rose 1.3 percent over the prior quarter. Over the last year, that index is up 6.2 percent.
