The U.S. housing market continues to rebalance and looks promising for the spring buying season.

• National trend: U.S. home price growth eased to 0.74% year over year in January 2026, down from the 3.43% growth recorded at the beginning of 2025.
• Forecast: Cotality expects home prices to rise 4.43% by January 2027.
• Regional strength: Midwest and Northeast hubs continue to show resilience. Newark, NJ, and Hartford, CT, both saw annual price growth in January.
• Market imbalance: 69 of the largest 100 metros are overvalued. But cities like Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, and Honolulu could see rebounds in 2027.

IRVINE, Calif.: #HPI--Cotality™, a leader in property information, analytics, and data‑enabled solutions, today released its Home Price Index™ with January 2026 data. Year-over-year home price growth was 0.74% to start the year, continuing the cooling trend from 2025.

The housing market is in a rebalancing phase, and localized economic strength is the primary driver of demand. The Midwest remains the strongest region, with an average year-over-year growth of 3.56%. This is led by states like Illinois (+4.91%), Wisconsin (+4.78%), and Nebraska (+4.75%). In the Northeast, New Jersey (+5.6%) and Connecticut (+5.26%) continue to defy the national cooling trend, supported by relative affordability in smaller markets and sustained demand in major metro divisions like Newark and Camden. Meanwhile, prices are decelerating in the West and in parts of the South. Across the two regions, ten states saw negative home price appreciation, including Florida (-2.36%), Colorado (-1.31%), Hawaii and Utah (-1.11%), and Texas (-1.09), as the impact of the post-pandemic migration and expanded inventory levels cool off previously overheated markets going into the spring buying season.

“The current data reveals a 'two-speed' housing market; while high-cost coastal and sunbelt regions are undergoing price corrections, the Midwest and Northeast are proving remarkably resilient due to their relative affordability and stable employment bases,” said Cotality Chief Economist Dr. Selma Hepp. “Ultimately, locations with consistent job growth will remain the primary engines for price appreciation, but they also have larger inventory deficits, which are driving pressure on home prices.”

Top Takeaways:

• U.S. single-family home prices increased by 0.74% year over year in January 2026 compared with January 2025. On a month-over-month basis, home prices fell 0.1% from December 2025.
• Cotality’s forecast shows annual U.S. home price gains increasing to 4.4% year over year in January 2027.
• Newark, NJ posted the highest year-over-year home price increase of the country's 100 largest metro areas in January, at 6.73%. Hartford, Connecticut, saw the next-highest gain at 6.27%.
• Among states, New Jersey ranked first for annual appreciation in January (up by 5.60%), followed by Connecticut (up by 5.26%) and Illinois (up by 4.91%). Eleven states, including the District of Columbia, recorded year-over-year home price losses.
• The top markets at risk for price declines in the next 12 months, according to Cotality’s Market Risk Indicators are all in Florida: Cape Coral–Fort Myers, FL, Deltona-Daytona Beach-Ormond Beach, FL, Lakeland–Winter Haven, FL, Palm Bay–Melbourne–Titusville, FL, and West Palm Beach–Boca Raton–Delray Beach, FL.
• According to Cotality’s Market Condition Indicators, 69 of the largest 100 metros are currently overvalued, meaning their current home price indexes exceed their long-term values by greater than 10%.

The next Cotality Home Price Index will be released on April 7, 2026, featuring data for February 2026. 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.

About Market Risk Indicators

Market Risk Indicators are a subscription-based analytics solution that provide monthly updates on the overall health of housing markets across the country. Cotality data scientists combine world-class analytics with detailed economic and housing data to help determine the likelihood of a housing bubble burst in 392 major metros and all 50 states. Market Risk Indicators is a multi-phase regression model that provides a probability score (from 1 to 100) on the likelihood of two scenarios per metro: a >10% price reduction and a ≤ 10% price reduction. The higher the score, the higher the risk of a price reduction.

About the Market Condition Indicators

As part of the Cotality HPI and HPI Forecasts offerings, Market Condition Indicators are available for all metropolitan areas and identify individual markets as overvalued, at value or undervalued. These indicators are derived from the long-term fundamental values, which are a function of real disposable income per capita. Markets are labeled as overvalued if the current home price indexes exceed their long-term values by greater than 10% and undervalued where the long-term values exceed the index levels by greater than 10%.

Source: Cotality

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About Cotality

Cotality accelerates data, insights, and workflows across the property ecosystem to enable industry professionals to surpass their ambitions and impact society. With billions of real-time data signals across the life cycle of a property, we unearth hidden risks and transformative opportunities for agents, lenders, carriers, and innovators. Get to know us at www.cotality.com.

Fonte: Business Wire