Twin Cities Outpacing Other Major Metros for Home-Price Growth

Home prices in the Twin Cities are experiencing more substantial gains than those in most of the nation’s 19 other major metropolitan areas, according to report released Tuesday.
 
The Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller Home Price Index found that local home prices were up 5.7 percent in June as compared to a year earlier. Only one of the 20 metro areas included in the report—Phoenix—posted a more significant year-over-year gain; home prices there increased 13.9 percent during the period.
 
Meanwhile, home prices throughout the country increased by an average of 0.5 percent between last June and this June—representing only a fraction of the growth experienced in the Twin Cities. The last time that U.S. home prices posted a year-over-year gain was September 2010, and the federal government offered a home-buying tax credit through April 30 of that year.
 
All 20 cities tracked by the index also posted home price increases between May and June of this year—but Minneapolis recorded the second-largest month-over-month gain. Local home prices rose 4.8 percent during that period. Detroit, which experienced 6 percent growth during the period, is the only city that surpassed Minneapolis.
 
The home price index, which lags two months, uses a base value of 100 from January 2000 to measure home-appreciation value since that time.

The Twin Cities’ June index is 118.7—which means that area home prices have appreciated 18.7 percent since January 2000. The index for all 20 metro areas was 142.2 in June.

“We seem to be witnessing exactly what we needed for a sustained recovery—monthly increases coupled with improving annual rates of change,” David M. Blitzer, chairman of the Index Committee at S&P Dow Jones Indices, said in a prepared statement, referring to the nation as a whole. “The market may have finally turned around.”

The home-price index report was released by S&P Dow Jones Indices, LLC; it is a subsidiary of The McGraw-Hill Companies, a global resource for index-based concepts, data, and research. S&P Dow Jones Indices is responsible for the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

The home price indices are released monthly and constructed to track the prices of typical single-family homes located in the 20 major metro areas included in the report.