US home prices slipped 0.1% in August as annual growth edged up

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Home prices across the United States fell 0.1% between July and August 2026, according to the monthly home price report that the data firm Cotality published on Tuesday 6 October. Over twelve months the picture points the other way: the body of the release puts national single-family prices 1.8% higher than in August 2025, up from an annual rate of 1.6% in July.

Both movements are small, and they sit side by side in the same release. The annual rate has now quickened for five months in a row, Cotality says, while the monthly figure went backwards in a month that normally brings a gain. The firm expects more monthly falls through the winter and a full-year rise of 1.3% for 2026.

Cotality, US home price insights, published 6 October 2026, covering August 2026. The usual August gain is given by the firm as an approximate pre-pandemic average.

What the release says

Cotality is a market data firm, and the report is its own dated monthly release. The October edition covers prices recorded in August, so it describes the end of the summer selling season, not the autumn market that agents are working in now.

Three readings carry the release. The first is the monthly change, a fall of 0.1%. Cotality sets it against the average for the same month in the years before the pandemic, a rise of about 0.3%. Measured against that habit, August came in roughly 0.4 percentage points below what the season usually delivers.

The second is the annual change, which compares August 2026 with August 2025. It rose from 1.6% in July to the 1.8% given in the text of the release, and Cotality counts it as the fifth consecutive month in which the annual rate has accelerated.

The third is the forecast, which is lower than the current annual rate and is covered in the last section. Read together, the three say that prices are a little higher than a year ago, that the gap with last year has been widening slowly since the spring, and that the most recent month was soft.

Cotality's chief economist, Dr Selma Hepp, links the subdued market to borrowing costs. In the release she says that high mortgage rates are still holding down the number of transactions, and that mortgage rates will be the main influence on home price trends in 2027.

Two figures for one annual change

One detail of the page needs stating plainly, because the headline number appears on it with two values.

The gap is one tenth of a percentage point, and it changes nothing about the direction of the market. Either value is above July's 1.6%, so the statement that annual growth picked up in August holds on both. Where this article uses a single number for the annual change, it is the 1.8% of the body text, which is also the figure the firm's commentary uses, and the 1.7% of the description stands beside it as an unresolved alternative.

The two 1.7% figures in the release should not be confused. One is the annual change for August 2026 as written in the page description. The other is a forecast: Cotality projects that national prices will be 1.7% higher in August 2027 than in August 2026.

Houses and condos part ways

The national figure hides a wide gap between property types. Cotality reports that prices of single-family detached homes rose 2.1% in the year to August. Prices of condos and townhomes rose 0.1% over the same period, which is close to no change at all.

That is a difference of 2.0 percentage points between the two segments. For a listing agent it means the national headline describes neither product well: a detached house has, on average, gained slightly more than the headline suggests, and an attached home has gained almost nothing in a year.

The release gives one city example of how annual and recent readings can diverge. In San Francisco prices were 7.0% higher in August than a year earlier, a strong annual result. Yet Cotality's three-month measure of momentum for the same metro was -2.7%. A market can therefore show a large gain against last year and still have been losing ground through the summer. The annual number looks back twelve months; the three-month number shows what has happened lately.

Where prices rose and where they fell

The state figures show a clear regional split, with the Midwest and the Northeast ahead and parts of the West and South flat or lower.

Three of the five leading states, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio, are in the Midwest, and the other two, Connecticut and New Jersey, are in the Northeast. Of the seven states Cotality lists at the bottom, three recorded outright annual falls: Texas, Hawaii and Washington. The other four were still positive, but none reached 1%.

The distance between the top and the bottom of the list is 7.5 percentage points, from Illinois to Texas and Hawaii. A national rate of 1.8% is the average of markets that are behaving very differently, which is why Cotality's own outlook singles out one region: the firm expects the Midwest to keep outperforming.

The tight end of the market: upstate New York

Trade-press reporting published the same day shows what the strong end looks like on the ground. HousingWire, drawing on its own HousingWire Data figures in an article dated 6 October, described upstate New York and nearby Northeast metros as running against a national slowdown in which pending sales are down roughly 10% from a year earlier.

Its measure is months of supply: how long the homes currently listed would last at the present pace of sales. The lower the number, the fewer homes buyers have to choose from.

Rochester is the tightest of the group. HousingWire counts 1,024 active listings there, a median list price of US$289,000 and a median of 21 days for a home to go under contract. Only 21% of Rochester listings carried a price cut, against 43% nationally.

Syracuse had 928 active listings at a median list price of US$325,000, with a median of 42 days to contract and price cuts on 31.9% of listings. HousingWire also notes the chip plant Micron plans in Clay, about 20 minutes from downtown Syracuse, and cites local reports projecting 50,000 jobs in New York State in total, 9,000 of them directly with Micron.

Prices in the larger coastal metros are far higher, yet supply is still short. The median list price was US$895,000 in Boston, with 4,937 active listings, and US$989,000 in Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk. The New York metro had 20,191 active listings at a median of US$799,000 and a median of 56 days to contract. Hartford homes took a median of 35 days. HousingWire puts Providence at 2.1 months of supply and Worcester at 1.8.

Zillow's September market report, also dated 6 October, has price readings for Buffalo and Hartford. It puts home values in Buffalo 3.1% higher than a year earlier, at US$287,962, with its sales estimate for the metro up 6.3%, and home values in Hartford up 5.0%. That Hartford figure sits 1.3 percentage points below the 6.3% Cotality reports for Connecticut as a whole, although the two firms measure different areas with different methods.

How other measures compare

Cotality's index is one of several that track US home prices, and they do not move in step. The FHFA said in a news release dated 29 September that its House Price Index rose 0.3% in July and stood 2.6% above its level a year earlier.

For July, then, the FHFA's annual rate was 2.6% and Cotality's was 1.6%. They are separate indexes from separate publishers, so the two rates are not directly comparable. What they share is the order of magnitude: annual growth in the low single digits.

A second set of figures, cited at the eXp Con event and reported by HousingWire on 8 October, describes how many local markets are falling. According to that report, more than 100 of the 300 largest metros recorded annual price declines in 2025, against 54 in 2026. The same report gives Austin as down 4.46% over the year and Abilene as up about 9%, and puts the annual rise in inventory at 5.9%, compared with 28.9% last year.

Two points follow from those numbers, with the caution that they come from a conference presentation relayed by the trade press and not from a statistical release. Fewer large metros are posting annual falls than a year ago. And Texas, the joint-weakest state in Cotality's list at -0.7%, contains both a metro that is falling and one that is rising quickly, so even a state average covers opposite local results.

What Cotality expects next

The firm's outlook has three parts, all of them projections and none of them certain.

First, Cotality expects prices to keep falling from one month to the next through the winter. August's 0.1% dip is, in its view, the start of a run and not a one-off.

Second, it projects annual appreciation of 1.3% for 2026 as a whole. That is below the 1.8% annual rate recorded in August, which implies the firm does not expect the five-month acceleration to continue to the end of the year.

Third, it projects that national prices in August 2027 will be 1.7% above their August 2026 level, a pace close to the one just recorded, with the Midwest still ahead of the rest of the country.

For sellers and their agents, the practical reading is about timing and place. A monthly fall and a forecast of more to come describe a national average during the slower months of the year; the state table shows that the average is made of markets several percentage points apart. For buyers, the same release says that prices are barely higher than a year ago in much of the West and lower in Texas, Hawaii and Washington. HousingWire's supply figures, separately, show how few homes are listed in parts of the Northeast. In Dr Hepp's account the variable to watch is the mortgage rate, which she expects to drive price trends in 2027.

Kooky, from Shaka

Kooky edits Agents Estate and builds Shaka, the payment router he made for real estate professionals. One payment comes in, and every agent, agency and party in the deal receives their signed share on closing date.

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