Cotality: Slower Home Price Growth Could Open Doors for More Buyers

IRVINE, Calif., August 06, 2025 — Cotality™, a leader in property information, analytics, and data-enabled solutions, released its Home Price Index™ for June 2025 today. June saw home price growth remain below 2%, indicating a continued market slowdown.

Housing markets in the Sun Belt have seen particularly noticeable declines, while the Midwest and the Northeast are seeing seasonal price gains that align with pre-pandemic trends. The Northeast has continued recording strong price growth as compared to the rest of the country. Connecticut, New Jersey, and Rhode Island topped the charts this month, posting 7.8%, 7.2%, and 6.6% growth, respectively. While most of the areas are experiencing a slowdown in annual appreciation, home price appreciation in New Jersey has accelerated in recent months. Similarly, Hawaii and Kansas are appreciating at a faster pace than in April of this year, and a few other states, including North Dakota, Indiana, and Maine, are seeing a similar trend. In addition to the Northeast, the Midwest continues to rank high with robust price growth as the region boasts the highest affordability nationwide.

“Markets demonstrating strong fundamentals — such as those in West Virginia — where affordability remains attractive and domestic in-migration continues, are likely to see continued home price growth,” explained Cotality Chief Economist Dr. Selma Hepp. “Slowing price growth and increased for-sale inventories are gradually improving affordability, which has recently been at its lowest levels in more than 30 years. These changes are creating new opportunities for potential homebuyers who were previously unable to enter the market due to high prices. But the extent to which buyers can enter the market is influenced by the stability of the labor market and the absence of major layoffs.”

Even though the housing market is seeing a slowdown in price increases, prices are still rising. This month’s median sales price for a single-family home is $403,000. Still, price growth is now under the rate of inflation, which means that relative prices are inching closer to affordability and have laid the foundation for a buyers’ market going forward.

“With mortgage rates remaining elevated and concerns about a slowing U.S. economy, subdued demand and downward pressure on home prices is expected to persist, particularly in regions where prices have already decelerated or where recent appreciation has significantly limited local affordability. Additionally, greater price pressures are evident in markets with notable inventory increases, such as the Washington D.C. metro area and Denver, Colorado.”

The next Cotality Home Price Index will be released on September 2, featuring data for July 2025. For ongoing housing trends and data, visit the Cotality Insights blog: www.cotality.com/insights.

Methodology

The Cotality HPI™ is built on industry-leading public record, servicing and securities real-estate databases and incorporates more than 45 years of repeat-sales transactions for analyzing home price trends. Generally released on the first Tuesday of each month with an average five-week lag, the Cotality HPI is designed to provide an early indication of home price trends by market segment and for the Single-Family Combined tier, representing the most comprehensive set of properties, including all sales for single-family attached and single-family detached properties. The indices are fully revised with each release and employ techniques to signal turning points sooner. The Cotality HPI provides measures for multiple market segments, referred to as tiers, based on property type, price, time between sales, loan type (conforming vs. non-conforming) and distressed sales. Broad national coverage is available from the national level down to ZIP Code, including non-disclosure states.

Cotality HPI Forecasts™ are based on a two-stage, error-correction econometric model that combines the equilibrium home price—as a function of real disposable income per capita—with short-run fluctuations caused by market momentum, mean-reversion, and exogenous economic shocks like changes in the unemployment rate. With a 30-year forecast horizon, Cotality HPI Forecasts project Cotality HPI levels for two tiers — Single-Family Combined (both attached and detached) and Single-Family Combined Excluding Distressed Sales. As a companion to the Cotality HPI Forecasts, Stress-Testing Scenarios align with Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review (CCAR) national scenarios to project five years of home prices under baseline, adverse and severely adverse scenarios at state, metropolitan areas and ZIP Code levels. The forecast accuracy represents a 95% statistical confidence interval with a +/- 2% margin of error for the index.