The annual pace of home price growth as measured by the marquee gauge of US property values decelerated a second month as the spring buying season kicked off.

Tuesday’s update on the Case-Shiller indexes found the 20-City measure notching a 4.1% YoY gain for March, down from 4.5% the previous month and below estimates. (Remember: This data’s reported on a two-month lag.)

This marks the second consecutive month during which the annual rate of price appreciation slipped.

The broader national gauge rose 3.4% in March from the same period a year ago, considerably slower than February’s annual rate.

Seasonally adjusted, prices fell in March versus February, but Nicholas Godec, S&P Dow Jones’s head of FICC, cited the unadjusted figures in cheering “renewed spring momentum” and “resilience.”

It’s fair to call that characterization debatable. Most market observers would describe the 2025 spring buying season as mediocre at best. Builder sentiment’s awful, the resale market continues to struggle and a robust read on new home sales for April probably reflected heavy discounting and incentives more than it did “resilience.”

Still, the overarching narrative hasn’t changed, and it’s broadly supportive for prices even as affordability constraints “weigh on demand.” Supply remains an issue in the resale market where the “golden handcuffs” effect is still constraining inventories. “Many existing homeowners are reluctant to sell and give up low pandemic-era mortgage rates,” Godec went on. “The scarcity of homes for sale offset softer demand and helped support home prices.”

As a fun aside — i.e., to break up what can otherwise be monotonous housing updates — I thought I’d highlight some new color from Redfin on the luxury market, where prices rose faster than non-luxury for a fifth straight month in April. The figure below gives you some context for how the pandemic changed that relationship. Prior to COVID, non-luxury price growth always outstripped luxury price appreciation. Post-pandemic, not so much.

And yet, as the white line shows, contract activity in the luxury market fell nearly 10% last month, the sharpest drop since 2023. The result: The slowest April for luxury in at least 10 years.

As Redfin senior economist Sheharyar Bokhari explained, “high-end buyers often sell stock to help with down payments, but many pressed pause on their home search when the stock market tumbled in April.” (Thanks a lot “Tariff Man.”)

Oh, and if you were curious, you needed $1.348 million to buy the “typical” US luxury home in April. As Redfin’s Mark Worley noted, that was “down slightly from the record high set in March.”