Home prices in major U.S. metropolitan areas continued to increase at a slower pace in the month of May, Standard & Poor's revealed in a report released on Tuesday.
The report said the S&P/Case-Shiller 20-City Composite Home Price Index increased at an annual rate of 9.3 percent in May compared to the 10.8 percent growth reported for April.
Economists had expected the pace of year-over-year growth in home prices to show a more modest slowdown to an annual rate of 9.9 percent.
With the bigger than expected slowdown, the 20-City Composite Home Price Index showed its slowest annual rate of growth since February of 2013.
S&P said all twenty cities with the exception of Charlotte and Tampa saw their annual rates of home price growth decelerate compared to the previous month.
The report also said the 20-City Composite Home Price Index edged down by a seasonally adjusted 0.3 percent on a monthly basis in May.
Economists had expected the index to increase by about 0.3 percent for the month compared to the 0.1 percent uptick seen in April.
On a non-seasonally adjusted basis, the index climbed 1.1 percent in May, matching the increase seen in the previous month.
"Housing has been turning in mixed economic numbers in the last few months," said David M. Blitzer, Chairman of the Index Committee at S&P Dow Jones Indices. "Prices and sales of existing homes have shown improvement, while construction and sales of new homes continue to lag."
He added, "At the same time, the broader economy and especially employment are showing larger improvements and substantial gains."
On Monday, the National Association of Realtors released a separate showing an unexpected drop in pending home sales in the month of June.
NAR said its pending home sales index dropped by 1.1 percent to 102.7 in June after surging up by 6 percent to 103.8 in May. The decrease came as a surprise to economists, who had expected pending home sales to increase by another 0.5 percent.
A pending home sale is one in which a contract was signed but not yet closed. Normally, it takes four to six weeks to close a contracted sale.
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Forex News
May 22, 2026 14:46 ET Minutes of the latest Fed policy session was the highlight of the week along with survey data on the U.S. housing market. In Europe, survey data signaled the trends in the euro area private sector. Further, consumer price inflation data from the U.K. was in focus. In Asia, various economic indicators from China drew attention to the health of the economy.