St. Louis is the home of FRED and the FRED Blog and part of the Federal Reserve’s Eighth District. In the past few years, the housing markets in the seven states of our District have cooled and are slowly returning to their previous trend.

The FRED graph above plots the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s house price index for these states over the past five years: House price appreciation has moderated since its peak in 2022 and is now back to pre-pandemic levels, with prices increasing between 4% and 5% annually.

The second graph above shows the number of active house listings for each state relative to the number of listings in May 2017. Despite the normalization of price growth, the number of houses in most of these markets remains well below pre-pandemic levels. House inventories range from only 33% in Illinois to 99% in Tennessee, compared with the number in 2017.

It’s worth noting the positive relationship between the speed of house price appreciation and the increase in the supply of housing, seen most clearly here in Tennessee: Compared with the other states in our District, Tennessee had the fastest pace of price growth and also the fastest increase in the supply of housing.

How these graphs were created: First graph: Search FRED for “All Transactions House Price Index for Arkansas” and click on the first link. Click “Edit Graph” in the top right corner and change the units to “Percent Change from a Year Ago.” To quickly add the other states’ data, use this pattern of series IDs in the “Add Line” tab: “ARSTHPI” where the “AR” is for Arkansas, “ILSTHPI” where the “IL” is for Illinois, etc. Change the first date of the time frame to May 2017. Second graph: Search for “Housing Inventory: Active Listing Count in Arkansas” and click on the first link. Click “Edit Graph” to change the units to “Index (Scale Value to 100 for a chosen date),” choosing 2017-05-01. Add the series IDs in the same way as above, except the two letters that identify the state are at the end of the series IDs: “ACTLISCOUAR,” ACTLISCOUIL,” etc.

Suggested by John Fuller and Violeta Gutkowski.