San Diego homes are still worth less than they were a year ago, but there are signs that trend is turning around.

The San Diego metropolitan area saw its annual home price decrease 5.6 percent in April, said a new S&P Case-Shiller Indices report. That puts San Diego in the bottom half of the 20-city index, but monthly data shows a different story:

Some expensive markets are beginning to pick up steam again.

San Diego metro — which includes all of San Diego County — saw prices rise 2 percent from March to April, said the index’s non-seasonally adjusted data. That was the sixth highest behind Boston (2.9 percent), Cleveland (2.9 percent), Detroit (2.3 percent), Seattle (2.3 percent) and San Francisco (2.2 percent).

“The ongoing recovery in home prices is broadly based,” wrote Craig Lazzara, managing director at S&P. “Before seasonal adjustments, prices rose in all 20 cities in April (as they had also done in March).”

The Case-Shiller Indices track repeat sales of identical single-family houses — and are seasonally adjusted — as they turn over through the years. The San Diego County median resale single-family home price was $900,000 in April.

Zillow senior economist Nicole Bachaud wrote that it is likely prices would continue to rise in the busy summer buying season, but cool in the fall.

“Looking more at the monthly trends in home prices we can see that this spring is finally settling back into the relatively normal rhythms of the housing market,” she wrote.

She said that it’s hard to compare April 2022 to April 2023 because interest rates were just about to pick up in 2022 and there was a rush of buyers to get into homes.

On an annual basis, Miami had the biggest price gain at 5.2 percent. It was followed by Chicago at 4.1 percent, Atlanta at 3.5 percent and Charlotte at 3.4 percent.

Ten markets in the 20-city index were down annually. The biggest drop was in Seattle, down 12.4 percent, and San Francisco, down 11.1 percent.

Danielle Hale, chief economist at Realtor.com, wrote that higher mortgage rates were keeping homeowners from selling, making buyers who are determined to buy now more willing to pay over the asking price — thus driving up prices in many cities.

“Home price trends are caught in a tug of war between stretched buyer budgets,” she wrote, “and limited inventory forcing competition despite reduced affordability.”

The interest rate for a 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage was 6.34 percent in the last week of April, said Freddie Mac, up from 5.1 percent the year before.

Source: SDuniontribune by Phillip Molnar