The marquee gauge of US home prices posted its largest annual gain in a year in data released Tuesday.

And yet, price growth nevertheless undershot headline inflation for a 13th consecutive month, suggesting homes are still getting more affordable at the margins.

Lest I should inadvertently insult someone, allow me to offer the usual caveat: The process by which homes depreciate in real terms, thereby becoming more attainable as long as wage growth generally keeps up with economy-wide inflation, is glacial. The US housing market needs meaningfully lower rates on a sustained basis to thaw on anything like a reasonable timeline.

With that out of the way, the figure below gives you the context. June’s 2.1% gain for the S&P Cotality Case-Shiller 20-city gauge (remember: this series is reported on a two-month delay) was the briskest since 2025’s buying season. The undershoot versus headline inflation, which slipped in June as oil prices receded, was -1.4%, the shallowest since the war began.

The broader, national index, posted a 1.5% advance for June, quicker than the prior month’s 1.2% annual increase, but 2ppt slower than all-items CPI.

“While home prices continue to decline in real terms, lower inflation and firmer nominal home price growth in June helped slow the pace of erosion,” S&P Dow Jones’s Rebecca Kaufman remarked. “The housing market remains under pressure [a]s financing costs are high for prospective buyers [and] current homeowners remain reluctant to give up the low mortgage rates secured in prior years.” Same story, different month.

Meanwhile, an update from Redfin shows 14% of US home deals fell through in July. That was the highest share since November of 2023, the month after mortgage rates peaked for the cycle at almost 8%.

Redfin’s Dana Anderson chalked it up to buyers having more leverage in a market where sellers predominate by the widest margin on record.

“Home-purchase cancellations are most prevalent in buyer-friendly southern markets, where a lot of inventory and fewer buyers are giving house hunters more confidence to walk away from deals,” she said.

But it’s not just buyer leverage that’s causing deals to fall through. In the same editorial, Anderson quoted an agent in Orlando. “Sometimes buyers get cold feet before the inspection,” he said. “They revisit the numbers with their lender, get anxious about the payment and never even send the deposit.”