by Calculated Risk on 5/23/2012 01:55:00 PM

The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) releases several house prices indexes. The most followed are the Purchase Only repeat sales index, both monthly and quarterly, based on Fannie and Freddie loans only, and the quarterly "expanded data series" that includes data from FHA endorsed mortgages and county recorder data licensed from DataQuick.

Here are the key results released today:
1) The quarterly Q1 seasonally adjusted purchase-only house price index showed the first year-over-year (YoY) increase since 2007.

2) The monthly (March) purchase only house price index showed a larger YoY increase of 2.7% in March compared to a 0.3% YoY increase in February. This is the largest YoY increase since 2006.

3) The expanded data series showed a smaller YoY decline of 1.3% in Q1 (smaller than the 3.0% YoY decline in Q4).

From the FHFA: HPI Shows Quarterly Increase and First Annual Increase Since 2007

U.S. house prices rose modestly in the first quarter of 2012 according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s (FHFA) seasonally adjusted purchase-only house price index (HPI). The FHFA HPI was up 0.6 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis since the fourth quarter of 2011. The HPI is calculated using home sales price information from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgages. ... FHFA’s seasonally adjusted monthly index for March was up 1.8 percent from February.

FHFA’s expanded-data house price index, a metric introduced in August 2011 that adds transactions information from county recorder offices and the Federal Housing Administration to the HPI data sample, rose 0.2 percent over the latest quarter. Over the latest four quarters, the index is down 1.3 percent.