The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) reported today that home prices rose 0.1% last month and are up 6.6% from a year ago.  As the overseer of Fannie & Freddie, FHFA gets its data from every home that is sold with a new conventional mortgage used to facilitate the transaction.

The Case Schiller Index (CSI) rose 0.2% this month and 5.6% from a year ago. The CSI analyzes data from the country’s 20 largest cities AND it also includes cash transactions.  The fact that it’s 1.0% less than FHFA can indicate a mixture of two things: 1) cash buyers get a discount. 2) people are still leaving big cities to move to smaller towns and are driving up the prices in rural America.

Bottom line though is that prices are still going up.  In fact, they’re risen 46% in the last 60 months despite higher interest rates.  Prospective home buyers who are on the sidelines waiting for something to crack are unfortunately only seeing the gap widen between what there is and what they want.