Of the 129 largest metropolitan areas tracked by the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s House Price Index, 39 lost value in the first quarter of 2025. Cape Coral-Fort Myers, Florida, posted the steepest decline among major metros, with the FHFA repeat-sales index showing a year-over-year drop of approximately 9%. Detroit posted the largest gain, with the index registering an increase of approximately 17%. The gap between those two numbers tells the story of a national housing market that no longer behaves like one.
Five years ago, nearly every metro in the country was rising in lockstep, lifted by pandemic-era mortgage rates below 3% and a flood of remote-work relocations. That era is over. The Q1 data, released by the FHFA in May 2025, reveals a market splintering along regional fault lines: oversupplied Sun Belt cities pulling back, affordable Midwestern metros pushing higher, and most of the country somewhere in between.
Cape Coral’s correction deepens
The Cape Coral-Fort Myers metro was one of the pandemic’s biggest winners. Remote workers poured into Southwest Florida, and home values roughly doubled between 2020 and early 2023. That run is now unwinding in a serious way.
The FHFA’s repeat-sales index for the metro, published through the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, shows prices peaked and have entered a sustained slide. The approximately 9% first-quarter decline, as measured by the repeat-sales methodology, is among the sharpest pullbacks of any large metro in the country…