FNC: January Home Prices Down 0.3%

FNC Inc., Oxford, Miss., said its January Residential Price Index showed U.S. home prices showed a seasonal decline, down by 0.3 percent from December, reflecting flat home sales.

On a year-over-year basis, FNC said home prices rose 6.4 percent.

“January is typically a slow month for housing activity, and month-over-month fluctuations in home prices tend to reflect that,” said Yanling Mayer, FNC housing economist and director of research. “In San Francisco, for example, home prices dropped 2.0 percent in January, which was largely driven by a sales shift toward lower-priced and smaller homes, thus better viewed as noise in the data rather than a meaningful decline in price.”

FNC said as of January, the proportion of final sales of foreclosed and REO properties comprised 12.7 percent of existing homes sales, up from 10.8 percent in December but down from 14.2 percent a year ago. Mayer said sales of foreclosed homes typically peak in January and February.

In the for-sale market, FNC said January’s average asking-price discount was 4.4 percent, up slightly from the previous months. The company said preliminary February data indicate average asking-price markdown shows no signs of worsening.