Home prices and sales volumes in the Seattle metro area in April posted healthy gains that outpaced the nation, according to Case-Shiller index data released Tuesday.

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Home prices and sales volumes in the Seattle metro area in April posted healthy gains that outpaced the nation, according to Case-Shiller index data released Tuesday.

The average price of existing single-family homes in King, Snohomish and Pierce counties rose 0.9 percent from the previous month, after taking seasonal fluctuations into account. In March the average price gain was 1 percent.

Over the year, the tri-county region posted a 7.5 percent average gain, the same as in March, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices, publisher of the index.

In the 20-city index, April’s home prices increased in 11 metropolitan areas and fell in 9 others, with the overall index gaining 0.3 percent over the previous month after adjustment for seasonal fluctuations. Average prices rose 4.9 percent annually, slower than March’s annual gain of 5 percent.

“Home prices continue to rise across the country, but the pace is not accelerating,” said David Blitzer, managing director and chairman of the index committee, in a statement.

Denver and San Francisco led the index with the strongest appreciation over the past 12 months, at 10.3 percent and 10 percent, respectively.

Washington, D.C., saw the weakest annual appreciation, at 1.1 percent over the year.

The Seattle area saw double-digit annual appreciation in 2013 and early 2014, but the rate dropped to a 5.9 annual gain by last November before accelerating this year to its current 7.5 percent pace.

The recent single-digit gains are more sustainable, said Matthew Gardner, chief economist at real-estate brokerage Windermere. The pace of gains has accelerated since November.

Given exceptionally strong job growth and historically low interest rates, the main issue facing the local housing market is “the ridiculous lack of supply in the market place,” Gardner said.

“We haven’t seen listing activity this low in over a decade,” he said. “It’s going to remain a sellers’ market, and it’s going to be pretty tight for the rest of the year.”

Stephanie Karol, U.S. economist at Colorado-based research firm IHS, said the shortage of buildable land in the Seattle area will help lift prices higher until developers can deliver more homes.

“It looks like you’re going to be on the high end of the home-price appreciation range for a little while,” Karol said.

With the Federal Reserve expected to hike rates at the end of September, Karol said she expects a stampede of rate-sensitive buyers that could cause prices to spike temporarily in places like Seattle that have a shortage of homes for sale.

April’s home prices nationally were still about 15 percent below their last peak in summer 2006. The Seattle metro area is about 7 percent off its peak in 2007.

The Case-Shiller index is based on existing single-family home sales and focuses on the change in price of a home between the current sale and the previous sale.

Case-Shiller tracked 5,570 sales in the Seattle metro in April; that was about 38 percent more than a year ago and the highest number in any April since 2006.

Seattle-based Zillow also computes a home-price index, but it’s based on the estimated value of all properties in a market, not just those that sold in a given month. For April, the median value of single-family homes in the tri-county area was $366,100, up 6.4 percent over the year, according to Zillow.

April’s higher home sales and slowing price gains nationally are evidence that the housing market is moving back to normal, said Stan Humphries, Zillow’s chief economist.

“New and existing home sales are both up, and home-price growth continues to slow down,” Humphries said in a statement.

“Normal home-value growth is usually between 3 percent and 5 percent annually, well below growth rates of just a year ago, so the current pace is far more sustainable,” he said. “Local market dynamics – rather than larger, national economic trends – are dictating market conditions on the ground in individual communities, as they should. All of these trends signal good news for the market.”