Annual house price appreciation climbed to 0.9 percent in June 2026, the fastest year-over-year pace since August 2025, according to First American Data & Analytics’ Monthly Home Price Index report released July 27, 2026. It marks the second consecutive month of accelerating annual price gains after a long stretch of deceleration.
Even so, national home prices were flat month over month, unchanged from May to June 2026, First American said. Annual appreciation has now remained below 1 percent for 10 consecutive months, even as the year-over-year figure has ticked higher in back-to-back reports.
The pickup follows more than a year in which annual price growth ground slower and slower, at one point turning negative in early 2026 for the first time since 2012, according to First American’s data. Since bottoming out, the annual rate has firmed gradually, moving from roughly flat earlier this spring to 0.7 percent in May and now 0.9 percent in June, per the company’s monthly releases.
“The housing market is quietly inching back toward price growth,” said Mark Fleming, chief economist at First American, in the report. “Annual appreciation reached its fastest pace since last August, while also becoming broader based, with more than half of the markets we track once again posting annual price gains.”
Fleming attributed part of the shift to supply. “Inventory growth has slowed, after a year of rising supply helped keep price appreciation in check,” he said, according to the report.
First American’s metro-level data show wide variation beneath the national number. Chicago posted the strongest annual appreciation among major markets, up 6.2 percent year over year in June, followed by Pittsburgh (up 3.0 percent), Warren, Mich. (up 2.8 percent), New Brunswick, N.J. (up 2.4 percent) and Arlington, Va. (up 2.2 percent), First American reported.
At the other end, Denver recorded the largest annual decline among the markets First American tracks, down 2.6 percent year over year, followed by Tampa, Fla. (down 1.8 percent), and Oakland, Calif., Miami and Las Vegas, each down 1.7 percent, according to the report.
“Housing remains a local market story,” Fleming said. “Historically supply-constrained markets, such as Chicago, continue to post the strongest house price appreciation because inventory remains well below pre-pandemic norms.” He added that “as the national inventory recovery levels off, these local differences in housing supply will increasingly determine where house price appreciation strengthens and where it stalls,” per First American.
What it means
The figures First American reported are specific to its own Home Price Index, an automated valuation model-based measure the company compiles monthly from public record data. They describe First American’s read on the market, not a universal industry consensus, and other home-price measures with different methodologies and sample sets can show different results for the same period.
Within that frame, the verified facts are narrow but notable: national annual appreciation accelerated for a second straight month to 0.9 percent, prices were flat month over month, and the annual rate has now stayed under 1 percent for 10 months running, according to First American. Fleming’s own interpretation, as quoted in the release, is that the acceleration reflects slowing inventory growth after a year of supply gains, and that markets with the most constrained housing stock, led by Chicago, are seeing the strongest price gains. That is First American’s characterization of the drivers, not an independently verified causal finding, and RealtyWire is not extending it into a broader prediction about where prices go next.
What to watch
First American Data & Analytics typically releases its Home Price Index report monthly; the next update, covering July 2026 data, would be expected around late August 2026. That release will show whether June’s acceleration continues, stalls, or reverses, and whether the divide between supply-constrained markets like Chicago and softer Sun Belt and Western markets like Denver, Tampa and Las Vegas persists.
