From Mortgage Daily News - Home prices as measured by the CoreLogic Home Price Index (HPI) had the largest annual increase in January that it had experienced since April 2006. The January number was up 9.7 percent from January 2012 and represented the 11th consecutive month the HPI, which includes distressed sales, increased from its level one year earlier. The index was up 0.7 percent from December. All but two states, Delaware and Illinois are experiencing year-over-year price gains.

From Mortgage News Daily - Along with the usual monthly data, S&P/Case Shiller Home Price Indices released this morning also included data for all of 2012. The indices, a measure of U.S. home prices ended the year with strong gain with the national composite index up 7.3 percent for the year and the 10-City and 20-City Indices posting increases of 5.9 percent and 6.8 percent respectively.

From Wall Street Journal - The business of buying-and-renting houses, long dominated by local mom-and-pop investors, has morphed over the past two years into one of the hottest investments on Wall Street. Dozens of pension investors and private-equity firms, such as Blackstone Group LP BX +2.37% and Colony Capital LLC, are clamoring to buy homes in beaten-up markets, sometimes using money from foreign co-investors.

Home prices in 20 major U.S. cities were up 5.5% in November compared to a year earlier, their biggest jump in more than six years.

The latest reading of the closely watched S&P Case-Shiller index is another sign of the growing recovery in the long-battered housing market.

Existing homes sold in December at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.94 million homes according to the National Association of Realtors®. This is a 1.0 percent reduction in sales from November where the revised estimate was 4.99 million, down from an original estimate of 5.04 million. Existing home sales include single-family houses, townhomes, condominiums, and co-operative apartments.