Home prices grew just 0.5% nationally – the weakest growth since 2011 – while 28 of the 53 largest metros are now seeing price declines
The pandemic housing boom didn’t end with a crash. It ended with a whimper. According to the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s House Price Index for the first quarter of 2025, national home prices rose just 0.5% on a seasonally adjusted quarter-over-quarter basis, the weakest such quarterly reading since 2011, when the market was still clawing its way out of the foreclosure crisis. More than half of the country’s biggest housing markets didn’t grow at all: 28 of the 53 largest metros tracked by the agency posted outright price declines on a quarter-over-quarter basis.
That report, released in 2025, marked a turning point that has only become clearer with time. The data confirmed what many buyers and sellers had started to feel on the ground: the era of coast-to-coast price surges was over, replaced by a fractured market where geography and timing matter more than momentum.
Where prices are falling, and where they are not
The FHFA index tracks repeat sales of the same single-family properties using data from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgages. Its Q1 2025 metro-level tables reveal a country splitting into two distinct housing markets.
Among the 28 metros posting quarterly declines, several stand out. The San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley metro area recorded one of the steeper drops, falling approximately 2.1% from the prior quarter, according to the FHFA’s published tables. Austin-Round Rock-Georgetown, one of the pandemic era’s hottest markets, slipped roughly 1.8%. Denver-Aurora-Lakewood, Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler, and San Antonio-New Braunfels also pulled back in the range of 1% to 2%.
To put that in dollar terms: a 2% quarterly decline on a median-priced home around $550,000 in the San Francisco metro translates to roughly $11,000 in lost equity in just three months.
On the other side of the ledger, metros in the Northeast and parts of the Midwest continued to post modest gains. The Hartford-East Hartford-Middletown metro area rose about 1.5% for the quarter, and several upstate New York metros held steady or edged higher, supported by tighter inventory and comparatively lower price points.
The FHFA’s Q1 2025 report noted significant regional divergence beneath the national average, a pattern the agency’s historical data shows is more typical of cooling periods than of broad downturns.
A separate analysis from The Washington Post, drawing on ICE Home Price Index data at the ZIP-code level, adds another layer. That interactive map shows wide variation within individual metros, where one ZIP code may be falling while a neighboring one holds steady. The ICE HPI uses a different methodology and data universe than the FHFA index, so the two can diverge on specific metros even when they agree on the national trend. Taken together, both datasets point in the same direction: broad cooling with pockets of sharper stress.
Why this index matters
Not all home-price measures work the same way. Unlike private indices that may rely on listing prices, appraisals, or algorithmic estimates, the FHFA tracks actual sale prices on properties that have sold more than once with a conforming mortgage. That repeat-sales approach filters out shifts in the mix of homes being sold, producing a cleaner signal about whether values in a given area are genuinely rising or falling.
The index’s public data portal stretches back to the 1970s, which is what makes the “weakest seasonally adjusted quarterly growth since 2011” comparison meaningful. Only quarters during or immediately after recessions have produced readings this soft in the modern record.
There are limits. Because the dataset is built from conforming loans, it excludes jumbo mortgages and all-cash transactions, meaning it may undercount activity in the highest-cost neighborhoods and in markets where investors pay cash. For the bulk of owner-occupied homes financed with a standard mortgage, it remains the benchmark.
What the numbers leave out
The FHFA report confirms the direction and magnitude of price changes, but it doesn’t diagnose why any particular metro is falling. Rising inventory, elevated mortgage rates, shifting remote-work migration, local job losses: all are plausible factors, but the quarterly HPI doesn’t contain the data to untangle them.
Mortgage rates, which hovered near 7% for much of late 2024 and into early 2025 according to Freddie Mac’s Primary Mortgage Market Survey, are widely cited as a drag on demand. More recent rate data from Freddie Mac’s weekly survey can be checked for current levels, but as of this writing in mid-2026, publicly available government data does not yet cover the full intervening period. The FHFA index itself makes no causal claims, and the agency publishes backward-looking measurements, not forecasts.
The connection between falling home prices and broader economic risks, including rising mortgage defaults or reduced consumer spending from shrinking home equity, also sits outside the scope of this release. Drawing those links requires loan-performance data and household-balance-sheet information that the House Price Index was never designed to provide. That is worth keeping in mind before extrapolating a quarterly price dip into a full-blown economic warning.
What this means for buyers and sellers in mid-2026
For prospective buyers, the cooling that showed up in Q1 2025 data has reshaped the negotiating table. In metros where prices have been declining, sellers are more likely to accept contingencies, cover closing costs, or reduce asking prices after a few weeks on the market. That doesn’t make homes affordable in absolute terms, particularly with mortgage rates still well above the sub-3% levels of 2021, but it does restore some of the leverage that buyers lost entirely during the pandemic frenzy.
For current homeowners, the practical question is how much equity cushion remains. Most people who purchased before 2021 are still sitting on substantial gains, even after several quarters of modest declines. Those who bought at or near the 2022 peak in a now-declining metro face a tighter margin, and anyone considering a sale should look at local, not national, data before making decisions.
The national 0.5% figure is useful as a headline, but it obscures enormous variation from one metro to the next. Matching the right data tool to the right question matters: the FHFA index for the broad trend, ZIP-code-level private datasets for neighborhood specifics, and local MLS data for real-time listing and closing activity.
A market split by geography and timing
What the most recent federal data settled is that the pandemic-era pattern of everything going up everywhere is finished. With more than half of major metros seeing values slip as of Q1 2025, the housing market entered a phase defined by local conditions rather than national momentum. Some of those declining metros may have already found a floor; others may still be adjusting.
Whether this proves to be a brief reset or the opening stretch of a longer correction depends on forces the price index alone can’t measure: where rates go, how inventory builds, and whether the job market holds. The next several quarters of FHFA data will fill in the picture. For now, the clearest takeaway is that the market rewards attention to local detail in a way it hasn’t in years.
David M. Keller is a finance writer based in Columbus, Ohio, covering personal finance and consumer-focused economic topics. He earned his degree in journalism from Ohio University and began his career reporting on local business and economic trends for a regional media outlet. Since then, he has contributed to a variety of online publications, focusing on clear, practical coverage of topics such as cost of living, debt, and everyday financial decision-making.
