The Washington area saw the strongest climb in home prices in the United States in April.
Housing prices jumped 6.5 percent in the month from April 2009, according to data from CoreLogic, a real estate analytics company. Chicago saw the largest drop in housing prices among the nation’s largest metro areas, at 6 percent.
The median area sales price for an existing single-family home in the first quarter was $292,600, according to the National Association of Realtors.
With solid job growth and the expansion of the federal government, the area’s robust performance wasn’t entirely surprising, said Andy Bauer, regional economist for the Baltimore branch of the Richmond Federal Reserve.
“There’s always going to be some demand for D.C. housing,” particularly inside the Capital Beltway, he said.
Among states, Hawaii saw the biggest jump, at 13.4 percent, and Idaho performed the worst, dropping 7.2 percent.
Despite the area’s strong overall increase, there was a large discrepancy between Virginia and Maryland. Virginia saw the fourth-highest price climbamong states, at 6.5 percent, while Maryland’s drop of 4.3 percent was the fourth-worst. The District’s 3 percent home price increase was 14th in the country.
Housing boom?
Price change, April 2009-April 2010
Area
Change
Change excluding distressed properties
Washington area
6.5%
5.9%
District
3.0%
3.4%
Virginia
6.5%
3.6%
Maryland
-4.3%
0.1%
U.S.
2.6%
2.2%
Source: CoreLogic
But Anirban Basu, president and chief executive of Sage Policy Group, a Baltimore economic and policy consulting firm, cautioned not to infer too much from the discrepancy between Virginia and Maryland.
“The difference is largely due to a matter of timing,” he said.
During the housing boom in the first half of the decade, there was more construction in less-regulated Virginia compared with parts of suburban Maryland, he said. Northern Virginia was subsequently the first part of the area to succumb to the housing crash; the region has since seen a “first-in, first-out” trend, he said.
“As a result, we have witnessed more rapid and [pronounced] rebound in activity in Virginia than in suburban Maryland,” he said.
Bauer agreed.
“Part of the discrepancy is just that Maryland hasn’t caught up yet,” he said.
Nationally, home prices increased 2.6 percent compared with April 2009 and 0.8 percent compared with March, the data showed.
“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,” said Mark Fleming, chief economist for CoreLogic.
