After many months of year-over-year declines in Corelogic's Home Price Index (HPI),
Colorado showed a 0.9 increase during February 2012, marking the second month in a row during which CoreLogic has reported a year-over-year increase. The February HPI report, released Wednesday by Corelogic, shows the national HPI declining by 2.0 percent, year over year.
February 2012 was the second month since mid-2010 to show a positive year-over-year change in the HPI in Colorado. Annual declines have been common since 2009, although the trend in declines was interrupted briefly by the homebuyer tax credits which created some annual gains in the HPI in Colorado and nationally from late 2009 to mid-2010.
The small annual increase in the HPI of 0.9 percent during February reflects other home price indices, such as the Case-Shiller index and the FHFA's expanded house price index. Indeed, the Case-Shiller index for January 2012 (the most recent data available) showed the first positive year-over-year increase in 20 months. The CoreLogic HPI for February is one of the first home price measures to show positive gains, year over year, although the gain is quite small. The overall trend across indices has been one of flatness in home prices with some small declines in recent months.
The CoreLogic HPI shows that, nationally, home prices have fallen considerably more than prices in Colorado. This has been shown to be the case in several other home price indices as well. See the home price archive for more.
In the February report, only 15 states reported larger year-over-year increases than Colorado. The states wit the largest increases were West Virginia and Michigan with increases of 8.6 percent and 5.8 percent, respectively. The states with the largest declines in the home price index were Delaware and Connecticut with drops of 11.2 percent and 7.9 percent, respectively.
