Make New York Post a Preferred Source Think the housing market is finally giving buyers a break? Not around one East Coast region.
Home prices across the US rose a relatively modest 2.6% over the past year, but New York and its neighbors are stubbornly bucking the slowdown, according to new federal data.
Prices across a Middle-Atlantic region — New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania — surged 6.3% from July 2025 to July 2026, the biggest increase of any region in the country, according to the latest House Price Index from the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
And buyers hoping the region is finally starting to cool aren’t getting much relief yet.
Home prices in the three-state area jumped another 1.5% in July alone, five times the 0.3% increase nationwide and once again the largest gain among the country’s nine census divisions.
The numbers paint a strikingly different picture from the one emerging in some other corners of the country, where the pandemic-era housing boom has increasingly given way to slower price growth — and, in some cases, outright declines.
Nowhere is that contrast clearer than in the Mountain West.
Prices across the Mountain division — Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — fell 0.8% in July, marking the weakest monthly performance of any region in the country.
Over the past year, prices there managed to rise just 0.6%, also the smallest increase nationwide.
That means homes in New York’s three-state region appreciated at more than 10 times the annual pace seen in the Mountain West.
The divide is particularly notable after years in which pandemic-era migration helped fuel housing booms across many Western markets, as buyers sought more space and took advantage of remote work.
But the latest FHFA figures suggest there’s no longer one national housing market moving in lockstep.
Across the country as a whole, home prices increased 0.3% between June and July, after remaining flat the month before. On an annual basis, prices were up 2.6%.
Every US census division still recorded an annual increase, according to the federal data, but the size of those gains varied dramatically — from the Mountain region’s barely-there 0.6% rise all the way to the Middle Atlantic’s 6.3%.
For buyers around New York, that’s an especially frustrating split.
A broader national slowdown might ordinarily be expected to offer house hunters some breathing room after years of soaring prices. Instead, homes in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania continue to appreciate considerably faster than the country overall.
And while the FHFA numbers don’t mean every individual market or home across the three states rose 6.3% — the index tracks the broader region — they show just how differently housing markets are behaving depending on where buyers are looking.
The result is a tale of two housing markets: buyers in parts of the West are beginning to see prices slip, while those around New York are still watching them climb at the fastest pace in the nation.
For Northeast house hunters waiting for the national housing cooldown to finally reach their neighborhood, they may have to keep waiting.
