Atlanta home prices continued to decelerate into the autumn, rising at a slower pace than the national average, according to a highly-watched national report release this morning.
The region’s prices were up 0.1 percent in September, although they had a 6.2 percent gain during the past year – a stronger increase than most other American cities, reported the monthly report from the latest report from S&P/Case-Shiller.
Despite the recent sluggishness, that year-over-year gain was stronger than the national average of 4.9 percent.
More than nine years after the burst of the housing bubble, the national housing market is only now groping its way back to health, said Svenja Gudell, chief economist of Zillow, a housing research and data company.
“The Case-Shiller indices continued to grow at a consistent pace as the summer came to a close, and in line with more recent data that continues to show stabilization, if not quite normalization, in the U.S. housing market,” she said, in a statement today.
The greatest danger is that home prices have risen faster than wages and that higher interest rates could soon add to the mismatch, she said. “The threat of rising interest rates may soon put a damper on housing affordability.”
