As the staggering gains in home prices continue, more markets are seeing values higher than their local economies can withstand, leaving some experts fearing another bubble.

CoreLogic®, a leading global property information, analytics and data-enabled solutions provider, released its Home Price Index (HPI™) and HPI Forecast™, which shows home prices are up considerably.

Nationally, prices jumped 6.9 percent in April from a year ago, according to the latest monthly value report from CoreLogic. While that is slightly less than the 7 percent annual jump in March, it is still making more and more markets unaffordable.

Using a projection of home prices using the CoreLogic HPI and other economic variables wherein values are derived from state-level forecasts by weighting indices according to the number of owner-occupied households for each state, the CoreLogic HPI Forecast indicates that home prices will increase by 4.7 percent on a year-over-year basis through September 2018.

Of the nation’s 50 largest housing markets, 52 percent were considered overvalued in April. CoreLogic determines affordability ” … by comparing home prices to their long-run, sustainable levels, which are supported by local market fundamentals (such as disposable income)’ and considers a market overvalued when home prices are at least 10 percent higher than the long-term, sustainable level.

For comparison, in March 2018, 50 percent of markets were considered overvalued by the same standards. In fact, CoreLogic revised its annual home price growth for all of 2018 to 5.3 percent from 5.2 percent.

Not all expensive markets, however, are considered overvalued. San Francisco, for example, where prices are up more than 12 percent from a year ago, is considered at value, because local incomes can support the area’s prices. Boston is also considered at value.

But the Tampa-St. Petersburg market was listed at number 11 of the 50 largest overpriced housing markets, leaving experts to fear the worst: bubble. With a median sales price of $190,512, our local market saw an annual home price index increase of nearly 8 percent.

Other top-15 overvalued markets include Fort Worth, TX, Nashville, Tenn., Riverside, Calif., Oakland, Calif., Denver, Portland, Washington, D.C., Seattle, San Jose, Calif., Las Vegas, Phoenix and Los Angeles.

High demand and very short supply continue to drive up home prices as the supply of homes has precipitously dropped for three years. While more homes came on the market this spring, they have been selling at the fastest pace on record, according to the National Association of Realtors.

And while the best antidote for rising home prices is additional supply – so homebuilders have slowly ramped up production – most new homes are at the move-up or luxury level, not at the entry level, where most of the demand is. Sales of newly built homes fell in April, according to the U.S. Census – even as supplies in that category rose due in part to higher, non-entry level prices.

So while no one can say exactly where the boom-and-bust of this latest market will land, one thing remains certain: The professionals at DeLeon Sheffield Company are here to help you navigate the increasingly tricky waters of the now-booming Tampa real estate market.

Because at DeLeon Sheffield Company, ‘We’re More Than Realty; We’re Family.’