Home prices nationally grew just 1.4% year-over-year in July 2026, barely up from June’s 1.3% pace, according to Cotality’s September 2026 Home Price Insights report. In Abilene, Texas, prices climbed 13.3% over the same period — nearly ten times the national rate.
Cotality, the property-data firm formerly known as CoreLogic, tracks home price appreciation across hundreds of U.S. metro areas every month. The gap between Abilene’s growth and the national number captures what the firm’s chief economist, Dr. Selma Hepp, described in the report as a market no longer moving in one direction. Local labor markets and affordability constraints, she said, are now shaping price trends as much as anything happening at the national level.
Why Abilene is running so hot
Cotality’s report attributes Abilene’s outsized gains in part to AI-related investment activity in the region, the kind of localized economic catalyst that can push a mid-sized metro’s housing demand well past what national mortgage-rate trends would predict. Abilene wasn’t alone at the top of the list, either. Helena, Montana posted 10.4% annual growth, Manhattan, Kansas came in at 9.5%, and both Grand Forks, North Dakota and Terre Haute, Indiana logged 9.3% gains, according to the same report.
None of those markets are the ones typically associated with a hot housing market in national headlines: no Austin, no Miami, no Phoenix. That’s arguably the point of Cotality’s broader finding this month: the biggest movers, in either direction, are increasingly smaller and mid-sized metros driven by local economic quirks rather than the coastal-market names that used to define national housing trends.
Where prices are actually falling
On the other end, Dalton, Georgia saw prices drop 7.6% year-over-year, and Kahului-Wailuku, Hawaii (the Maui metro area) fell 7.2%. Napa, California dropped 4.3%, which Cotality’s report links to rising climate risk and insurance costs pricing buyers out of an area already dealing with wildfire exposure. San Francisco presents its own odd case: prices there are still up 7.0% over the past year, but fell 2.6% in just the last three months, suggesting the annual figure may be masking a market that’s cooling fast in real time.
With mortgage rates still sitting above 6.6%, Cotality’s outlook points to continued national cooling overall, but this month’s data makes clear that “national” is doing less and less work as a description of what’s actually happening to any individual homeowner’s equity, depending entirely on which metro they happen to live in.
