The American City With the Hottest Housing Market

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated May 6, 6:57AM EDT · Published May 5, 7:15AM EDT

The American City With the Hottest Housing Market — © SeanPavonePhoto / iStock via Getty Images

One of the gold standards for U.S. real estate prices is the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Indices, which is over two decades old. Recently, its monthly numbers have shown that U.S. home prices are surging. The U.S. National Home Price NSA Index showed that, in February, home prices rose 6.4% from the same month the year before.

“Following last year’s decline, U.S. home prices are at or near all-time highs,” said Brian D. Luke, Head of Commodities, Real & Digital Assets at S&P Dow Jones Indices. He added that the previous peak was in 2022 and that 2023 posted poor results because of rising mortgage rates.

The Case-Shiller figures also show numbers for 20 cities, year over year and month over the previous month. San Diego had the largest year-over-year increase in February by far. It was the only city with a double-digit jump: up 11.4%. That contrasts with the slowest growing market, Portland, which was up only 2.2%.

The Case-Shiller figures also show city prices indexed to January 2000. San Diego has had the second-largest increase since then, only slightly behind Miami’s.

There is no specific reason San Diego has done so well recently. California’s population has dropped in the past two years, while Florida, Texas, and Arizona have had increases measured on the same basis. Usually, as people leave an area, the improvement in real estate prices either slows or drops. San Diego residents should count themselves as lucky.

See which city has the most expensive houses in America.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.