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U.S. home prices posted a robust gain in August – another sign that the American housing market remains strong despite economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic.
But as strong as Greater Boston’s housing market has been during the pandemic, it only tied for ninth place with Washington, D.C. among the 20 hottest markets nation-wide.
The S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller 20-city home price index, released Tuesday, showed that home prices in those cities climbed 5.2 percent in August from a year earlier, accelerating from a 4.1 percent gain in July. The gain was stronger than economists had expected.
Nationally, prices rose 5.7 percent.
Phoenix (up 9.9 percent from August 2019), Seattle (up 8.5 percent) and San Diego (7.6 percent) posted the biggest gains. All 19 cities in the index recorded price increases. The 20-city index excluded prices from the Detroit metropolitan area index because of delays related to pandemic at the recording office in Wayne County, which includes Detroit.
Month-over-month, however, Boston has been in the top five metro areas with the fastest-growing prices since July, landing at fourth place in that month and fifth place in August after Detroit, Los Angeles and San Francisco in the former month and Los Angeles in the latter month.
Helped by rock-bottom mortgage rates, the U.S. housing market has been a source of strength as the U.S. economy climbs back from an April-June freefall caused by the pandemic and the measures taken to contain it.
“The supply of for-sale homes, already extremely tight, has only become more constrained in recent months, and historically low mortgage rates continue to encourage many buyers to enter the market,” Matthew Speakman, economist at the real estate firm Zillow, said in a research note. “This heightened competition for the few homes on the market has placed consistent, firm pressure on home prices for months now, and there are few signs that this will relent any time soon.”
The National Association of Realtors reported last week that sales of existing shot up 9.4 percent in September and that the median selling price of a home climbed 15 percent from a year earlier to $311,800.
In Massachusetts, single-family home sales spiked 27 percent year-over-year in September according to The Warren Group, publisher of Banker & Tradesman, while the median single-family home price increased 18 percent on a year-over-year basis to $472,000. Condominium sales jumped 26 percent on a year-over-year basis, The Warren Group said, with a median sale price of $418,000.
