US house price growth slows a tad in March, FHFA says

House prices in the US continued to rise at a steep pace in March amid continued strong demand and low inventories which more than offset slightly higher mortgage rates.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency's index of house prices advanced at a 0.6% month-on-month clip, which was down from a 0.8% pace observed in February.

"The steep, multi-year rise in U.S. home prices continued in the first quarter [...] Mortgage rates during the quarter remained slightly elevated relative to most of last year, but demand for homes remained very strong. With housing inventories still languishing at extremely low levels, the strong demand led to another exceptionally large quarterly price increase," said FHFA Deputy chief economist Andrew Leventis.

In terms of quarterly rates of change, in comparison to the fourth quarter prices were 1.39% higher after rising 1.54% over the previous three months.

Year-on-year price gains slowed from a 6.22% clip in the last quarter of 2016 to 6.0% in the first three months of 2017.

Economists at Barclays had anticipated a rise of 0.6% on the month for the index and an annualised gain of 6.1%.

Commenting on the data, Pooja Sriram at Barclays Research said: "The year-on-year growth stands at a solid 6.2%. Monthly growth of the FHFA index has recovered markedly since the low touched in January. Today's report remains consistent with trends in other home price indices which show annual home price appreciation in the range of 5-6% since 2015. We expect home prices to continue appreciating at a steady pace going into 2017."