Homes. They’re expensive! Half a million dollars worth of expensive if you want something half-decent in the US.

That’s what it means to be “average” in America: You can afford to finance a wooden box that costs as much as a well-appointed Rolls Royce.

Like a Rolls Royce, if you don’t go broke trying to buy a home, you’ll go broke trying to keep one up. As discussed here last week in a kind of cautionary tale for younger readers who might still be on the fence about the merits of investing in the proverbial white picket fence, getting in the door is just the first step. Even if you’re buying a new construction, you need a blank check up to, let’s call $100,000, to fix what’s going to be broken once you move in, and trust me: Stuff’s going to be broken, whether your box was built yesterday or yesteryear. As any home inspector will tell you, “There’s no such thing as a perfect house.”

With that in mind, Tuesday’s Case-Shiller update showed US home prices rose 3.8% YoY in November, an acceleration from the prior month’s 3.6% pace. (Remember: These figures are reported on a two-month lag.) The widely-followed 20-City index notched a 4.3% gain, marginally quicker than October’s annual advance.

Note from the figure that November’s pickup in the annual rate versus October’s 12-month pace counted as the first such month-to-month increase since March of last year. See that teeny, tiny red arrow? No? Well squint. It’s there.

Seasonally adjusted, all the Case-Shiller gauges — the national index, the 20-City and the 10-City — posted a MoM increase of 0.4% in November, ahead of consensus.

Amusingly, 4.3% annual growth just ain’t good enough for Brian Luke, S&P’s Head of Commodities, Real & Digital Assets. “With the exception of pockets of above-trend performance, national home prices are trending below historical averages,” he said Tuesday, adding that although price growth in the Northeast (and specifically in New York City) is holding around 6%, “markets out west and in once red-hot Florida are trending well below average growth.”

Prices in Tampa actually fell, and as Luke went on to note, “returns for the entire Southern region rank in the bottom quartile of historical annual gains.” Still, S&P’s national gauge notched an 18th straight all-time high, and if you don’t include Tampa, every single market rose on a monthly basis.

Renters will be forgiven if they’re not too upset about Luke’s “below-normal” price appreciation. After all, annual price growth in excess of 20% during the post-pandemic boom was roughly quadruple the historical average, and as the figure above reminds you, the “correction” (the “payback” or the “hangover” or whatever you want to call it) in 2023 amounted to four months of the shallowest of shallow YoY declines.

Meanwhile, FHFA prices rose 0.3% MoM and 4.2% YoY in November, matching estimates. “Annual house price gains continued to moderate, with sales prices in all nine Census divisions exhibiting slower pace of growth than a year earlier,” FHFA’s deputy director of research remarked on Tuesday. “The slowdown in price growth is likely due to higher mortgage rates contributing to cool[er] demand.”

Ahead of the data, Bloomberg Economics offered a five-word assessment: “Affordability remains a major challenge.”