Property Appreciation Topping Out: Veros

Home value acceleration and residential real estate appreciation continued to steadily improve for the sixth consecutive quarter.

The Veros HPI real estate market forecast for the top 100 metro areas covers more than 1,000 counties, 345 metro areas and 13,770 zip codes.
“Markets appear to be topping out for now,” says Eric Fox, vice president of statistical and economic modeling and author of VeroFORECAST.
The future HPI forecast continues to show good appreciation that demonstrates an overall healthy real estate market, but a slight quarterly increase that indicates much slowing in the forecasted rate.
Over 90% of the markets across the country are expected to see price appreciation, Fox adds. Despite currently strong appreciation forecasts, weaker increases are expected in the top five markets (typically metro areas with more than 250,000 residents) compared to the previous quarter’s top markets, which topped at 15%.
The projected five strongest markets are: San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, Calif., at 13.4%; San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, Calif., is 10.7%; Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, Wash., is 10.2%; Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, Calif., is 9.6%; Midland, Texas at 9.5%.
Meanwhile, depreciation levels that are still present tend to be down between 1% and 2%.
VeroFORECAST finds that local population trends and unemployment rates remain the key drivers with the least populated metro areas expected to perform the worst.  (Average population of the top 50 metros is 2.4 million and the average population of the bottom 50 metros is 527,000).
Nonetheless, most underperforming markets are primarily in the Northeast, with parts of Connecticut and some sections of New York, New Jersey and Maryland expected to fare poorly compared to the remainder of the U.S. due to persistent unemployment and demand factors.