The first quarter of 2017 saw a see-saw pattern in housing indexes.

What’s going down? The supply of homes on the market. Job growth is firing up demand for real estate, pushing buyers into bidding wars for the tight supply of homes on the market. There were 1.83 million previously owned homes available for sale at the end of March, down 6.6% from a year earlier, according to the National Association of Realtors.

What’s going up? Naturally then, home prices are rising. Home prices increased 6% in the first quarter from a year earlier as competition heated up for a scarcity of listings. Prices rose 1.4% on a seasonally adjusted basis from the previous three months, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) said in a statement recently.

The FHFA index measures transactions for single-family properties financed with mortgages owned or securitized by government-sponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It doesn’t provide prices. The national median price of an existing single-family home was $232,100 in the first quarter, up 6.9% from a year earlier, data from the Realtors group show.

What does that mean for us locally? Call me and we’ll talk more about it.

Source: National Mortgage News