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Home Prices Increase 0.6% for GSE-Backed Mortgages: FHFA

Home prices for GSE-backed mortgages rose 0.6 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis in the first quarter of 2012 compared to the previous 2011 fourth quarter, according to ""FHFA's"":http://www.fhfa.gov/Default.aspx purchase-only home price index (HPI). Prices also showed a 0.5 percent increase from the year ago first quarter, and month-over-month, prices increased 1.8 percent in March.

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The purchase only HPI uses home sales price information from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loans and includes more than 6 million repeat sales transactions.

""Consistent with other housing market indicators, the FHFA HPI showed stronger house prices in the first quarter, most notably in March,"" said Andrew Leventis, FHFA principal economist. ""Increased affordability and a somewhat smaller inventory of homes for sale are positively impacting house prices.""

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FHFA also has an expanded-data HPI, which adds sales price information from county recorder offices and the Federal Housing Administration and includes data sampled from 45 million repeat transactions.

According to the expanded-data HPI, prices gained 0.2 percent quarter-over-quarter, and compared to the year ago first quarter, prices dropped 1.3 percent.

On a quarterly basis, 30 states and the District of Columbia saw prices increases.

The five states with the highest yearly increases based on seasonally adjusted data from the purchase-only HPI were Hawaii (10.3 percent), Washington, D.C. (9.8 percent), Iowa (5.7 percent), Florida (4.7 percent) and North Dakota (4.4 percent).

The states that saw the greatest drop in prices were Delaware (-7.65), Nevada (-6.88), Washington (-5.39), New Jersey (-4.01), and Illinois (-3.53).

Of the nine census divisions, the Mountain division posted the largest quarterly gain at 1.4 percent. All divisions posted quarterly increases except for the New England division, where prices fell 0.7 percent.

According to data from the purchase-only indexes, among the 25 most populated metropolitan areas, Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown, Texas had the highest increase after posting a 2.4 percent quarterly gain. In Atlanta- Sandy Springs-Marietta, Georgia, prices dropped the furthest at 3.3 percent over the same period.

About Author: Esther Cho

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