The housing market has found its footing as evidenced by various metrics used to measure year-over-year performance.
• The House Price Index – Purchase Only documented by the Federal Housing Finance Agency shows an increase of 5.1 percent for the 12-month period ending in January 2015. This is the 36th time in the same number of months that the House Price Index showed a year-over-year increase. In the same period, the housing prices improved by 20.1 percent.
• The National House Price Index from Standard & Poor/Case Shiller mirrors the same trend. According to this metric, housing prices rose by 4.5 percent year-over-year for the period spanning January 2015. This is the 33rd consecutive month that the index increased with house prices rising by 22.1 percent over the previous 2.5 years.
• As far as public sentiment related to the housing market, senior executives of the mortgage industry expressed greater confidence than regular consumers that the market will continue to stabilize. House prices will trend up not down according to executives included in Fannie Mae’s Mortgage Lender Sentiment Survey. About a third of senior executives surveyed stated that house prices will remain the same while 3 percent expect prices to drop in the next 12 months..
• Fannie Mae’s National Housing Survey, which is a separate survey from the Lender Sentiment Survey, found that 46 percent of respondents believed that housing prices will increase in 2015 while 41 percent stated that they do not expect any major changes in the market. The same study reported that about 6 percent of the respondents expect price drops in the housing market.