CoreLogic Reports 2.6% Annual Increase in Home Prices

The analytics firm ""CoreLogic"":http://www.corelogic.com released its Home Price Index (HPI) Monday, which shows that residential values in the United States rose in April on an annual basis -- the second consecutive monthly increase.

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According to the California-based company, national home prices, including distressed sales, were up 2.6 percent in April 2010 compared to April 2009. It marked an improvement over March's year-over-year price increase of 2.3 percent.

CoreLogic reported that excluding distressed sales, year-over-year prices increased in April by 2.2 percent, which seems to signal that distressed properties now are not as heavily discounted as they were a year ago and are closing the price gap between traditional, non-distressed homes.

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On a month-over-month basis, CoreLogic's national home price index posted a 0.8 percent gain in April, which was stronger than the previous one-month increase of 0.1 percent from February to March.

“The monthly increase in the HPI shows the lingering effects of the homebuyer tax credit,” said Mark Fleming, chief economist for CoreLogic. “We expect that we will see home prices remain strong through early summer, but in the second half of the year we expect price growth to soften and possibly decline moderately.”

Including distressed transactions, the peak-to-current change in CoreLogic’s national HPI (from April 2006 to April 2010) is -29.5 percent.

But the company says the number of metro areas to post increasing home price trends in its study has been improving steadily since April of last year, when all of the top 100 metros had negative year-over-year price differences. As of April 2010, 60 of the top 100 Core Based Statistical Areas (CBSAs) were in positive territory compared to 12 months earlier â€" and that includes distressed property sales.

CoreLogic says Idaho (-7.2 percent) was the top-ranked state for annual price depreciation in April, followed by Illinois (-5.8 percent), and Nevada (-4.6 percent).

Hawaii (+13.4 percent) posted the greatest annual increase in CoreLogic’s study. Massachusetts (7.4 percent) fell into the second place spot, followed by California (7.3 percent) at No. 3 on the appreciation scale.