Corrected

Shallow growth in Chicago-area home prices continued its months-long pattern in July, again coming in at about half the rate of a year ago, according to new data from the leading monitor of U.S. home prices.

Local single-family home values rose 1.6 percent in July from a year earlier, according to the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Indices released this morning. That’s compared to the 3 percent growth Case-Shiller reported at this time last year for July 2018.

For most of 2018, home prices were growing at around 3 percent, Case-Shiller’s monthly reports showed, but in January it slipped, and since March, home prices have been growing at less than 2 percent.

Chicago-area prices are growing at half the rate of the nation’s home values. Nationwide, home values were up 3.2 percent in July.

Last week, Illinois Realtors data showed home prices increased in August. Case-Shiller's national report lags behind Illinois Realtors' reports by a month. The improvement that Illinois Realtors showed for August could show up in next month's report from Case-Shiller, although that's not certain, because the two reports use different data sets and different methodology.

Even when Chicago was running in the 3 percent range, it was half the nation’s home value growth, which was in the 6 percent range for much of 2018. That is, price growth has slowed down everywhere. “Year-over-year home prices continued to gain, but at ever more modest rates” in the past several months, Philip Murphy, managing director and global head of index governance at S&P Dow Jones Indices, said in comments released with the data.

Chicago’s home price recovery since the crash of the early 2000s has persistently been slower than much of the rest of the nation, thanks to, among other factors, a big foreclosure inventory in the first years of recovery, slow revival of the local economy and population loss.

A result is that by July, Chicago-area home values were still at about 12.2 percent below their early-2000s peak, while nationwide, home values long ago surpassed the old peak and in July were 12.8 percent above it. That explains why large numbers of homeowners here sell their homes at well below past sale prices.

The cities whose prices grew at a lower rate than Chicago’s in July are San Francisco (0.2 percent), New York (0.9 percent) and Los Angeles (1.1 percent). Seattle’s prices fell by 0.6 percent in July. The three West Coast cities have all fallen from the top of the growth pack, in some cases notching growth of more than 10 percent, in the past year. Also slipping from the top of the list is San Diego, whose home price growth in July was 2 percent.

The major city with the biggest price growth in July was Phoenix, at 5.8 percent.

Editor's note: A previous version of this story had some of the percentages wrong.