Black Knight Financial Services wrapped up the October series of national home price reports with its Home Price Index (HPI). It contained numbers nearly identical to those issued earlier in the day for the S&P CoreLogic Case Shiller National Index.  Black Knight, which publicly releases numbers on a non-seasonally adjusted basis, says October home prices were up 0.2 percent from September, the same as Case-Shiller's non-seasonally adjusted estimate of change.

Prices were up 5.6 percent for the year ended in October compared to a September 2015 to September 2016 gain of 5.4 percent.  It was the highest year-over-year increase for Black Knight's HPI thus far in 2016 and the 54th consecutive month of annual home price appreciation.  This put the HPI at $266,000, only 0.04 percent below the peak of $267,000 reached in June 2006.  The yearly increase was also identical to the corresponding Case-Shiller number.

The largest monthly HPI increases were in New York, Florida, and Washington, all achieving 0.7 percent gains.  They were followed by New Jersey at 0.6 percent and Idaho at 0.5 percent.  A number of states experienced negative appreciation, led by Alabama and Maryland at -0.07 percent.  North Dakota and Alaska saw their HPIs decline by 0.6 percent and Nebraska by 0.5 percent.

All five of the top appreciating metro areas and eight of the top ten were in Florida. The five leaders, Daytona Beach, Punta Gorda, Lakeland, Homossa Springs, and Tampa, all had increases of 1.2 to 1.0 percent.  New York City also posted a 1.0 percent increase.  Tuscaloosa saw prices drop by 2.5 percent and four other Alabama metros, Aniston, Gadsden, Montgomery, and Dothan, posted losses in the 0.8 to 0.9 percent range.

Among the 20 largest states tracked by Black Knight, six hit new peaks in October, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Washington.  Among the 40 largest metros new peaks were established in Austin, Boston, Charlotte, Dallas, Nashville, San Antonio, and Seattle.

The Black Knight HPI utilizes repeat sales data from the nation's largest public records data set as well as its own loan-level mortgage performance data to capture home price data from both disclosure and non-disclosure states.