Home prices across the United States continue to rise and show little sign of altering their upward course.
The S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller national home price index, a popular measure of US house prices, has reported a 6.3% annual gain in February, up from 6.1% a month earlier.
Year-over-year prices have increased continuously since May 2012, S&P's data suggests. Over that time, the annual price increases averaged 6% per year, which is comparable to the span between January 1992 and February 2007, when prices averaged 6.1% annually.
“Home prices continue to rise across the country,” said David Blitzer, managing director and chairman of the Index Committee at S&P Dow Jones Indices. “Increasing employment supports rising home price both nationally and locally.”
In the last 12 months until the close of February, Seattle saw the largest gain in home prices, reporting a 12.7% year-over-year increase. Chicago, meanwhile, only posted a 2.6% year-over-year increase in its house prices while San Francisco ended the same period with a 10.1% increase.
Homebuilder PulteGroup fares better than Wall Street expected
Shares of PulteGroup (NYSE:PHM), the US homebuilder, rose by 3.5% to US$29.90 in afternoon trade on Tuesday after its first-quarter results beat Wall Street analysts’ expectations by a mile.
Its net income jumped to US$170.8mln, or US$0.59 per share, which was almost double the US$91.5mln, or US$0.28 per share in the same period a year ago, and higher than Wall Street’s estimate of $US0.46 per share. PulteGroup’s revenue, meanwhile, climbed to US$1.97bn, up from US$1.63bln and better than the US$1.83bn consensus estimate from Wall Street analysts.
For the quarter, new orders for homes on a net basis increased 12% over the prior year to 6,875 homes and the dollar value of net new orders increased 18% to $2.9bn
PulteGroup’s home sale revenues for the first quarter, meanwhile, totaled $1.9bn, an increase of 21% over the prior year. Higher revenues for the quarter were driven by a 10% increase in the average selling price to $413,000, in combination with a 9% increase in closings to 4,626 homes.