The American City Where Home Prices Are Rising Fastest

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Sep 3, 7:10PM EDT

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The American City Where Home Prices Are Rising Fastest — © Moussa81 / iStock via Getty Images

The U.S. real estate market has been unusually strong for two years. Prices have risen by 20% most months during this period, year over year, according to the carefully followed S&P Case-Shiller housing price index.

The pace of home price growth has varied considerably from metro to metro. People migrated from extremely expensive markets on the two coasts. Among these are New York City, San Jose, and San Diego. These people often moved to less expensive cities inland which include Boise and Memphis. This slowed real estate price growth in the larger cities and accelerated the growth in the places people moved in great numbers.
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Americans have been able to be more mobile in part because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Millions of people worked from home, and some still do. Employers were forced to close offices entirely because of the danger of the virus. Some employees have been told they will never need to return to offices.

Another factor in mobility was low interest rates. The rate on 30-year fixed mortgages dropped to under 3% last year, which made houses more affordable. That has changed radically recently. Rates have risen well above 5% in some parts of the country.

The S&P Case-Shiller data shows prices increasing and decreasing both nationally and for the country’s 20 largest cities.

In two cities, prices rose over 30% in June, the month covered most recently in the S&P Case-Shiller data. These were Tampa, up 35%, and Miami up 33%. Ironically, Florida homes prices were decimated in the real estate downturn of The Great Recession, particularly 2008 and 2009. Foreclose rates in Florida soared over that period.

Other cities had extremely slow price growth in June compared to the market as a whole. Prices rose only 10.4% in Minneapolis and 10.8% in Washington DC.

What happens to home prices for the balance of this year and into 2023? If the past offers any roadmap, it is that the markets where home prices rise the fastest in good times also fall fastest when the economy gets soft.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.