SEATTLE—America's single-family homes will have gained 6.7% in value, or $2.75 trillion, by the time 2014 draws to a close, locally based Zillow said Friday, further making up the $6.1 trillion in value they lost between December 2006 and December 2011. Yet it's a smaller yearly increase than the residential market saw the previous year, and Zillow says that's in keeping with a moderation in home price improvement. It also has implications for the multifamily market, says Axiometrics economist Chuck Ehmann.

“Home prices can affect apartment markets, since increased purchase costs may keep more people in apartments for longer periods of time,” Ehmann wrote in a blog posting earlier this month. One reason that '14 has been called “The Year of the Apartment Market,” he added, was that prices for existing homes increased in 2012 and early 2013.

But that growth trend began slowing down in the latter part of last year, Ehmann observed, “which might lead to more demand for single-family homes in the next several months. Of course, new home prices have ticked up in the last quarter, while existing home prices tend to lag the new-home trend.

The reason for that, he explained, is that although new-home sales are recorded by the Census Bureau when a contract for sale is signed, “existing home sales are not counted until the contract is closed, typically one to two months after the sales contract is signed. Therefore, there is a slight lag for existing home sales and reported sales-price movement.”

A combination of low supply, increasing-yet-still-moderate demand and low interest rates constitute “a recipe for increased home prices,” according to Ehmann. “Demand for single-family homes can certainly not be termed as high, but it is higher now than it has been for the past few years.”

The run-up in home prices last year, though, could be attributed “more to market correction than long-term increased demand,” Ehmann wrote. “Home prices and values are playing 'catch up' from the depressed levels they saw in 2008 and 2009."

Meanwhile, the apartment sector continues going from strength to strength. Dallas-based Axiometrics said last week that national annual effective rent growth in November reached 4.7%, the year's strongest result to date and the highest since August '11, when the rate measured 5.0%.

“The national apartment market continues to outperform all expectations,” says Jay Denton, SVP of research and analytics for Axiometrics. “As we've been saying for months, the combination of an improving job market, and a growing percentage of the population that prefers renting to owning, continues to boost apartment demand.”

However, Denton's counterpart at Zillow, chief economist Stan Humphries, has a similar outlook for single-family housing, including rentals as well as for-sale properties. “As we conclude '14 and look ahead at 2015 and beyond, housing will play a bigger role in the broader economic recovery,” he says. “As the job market improves and more households form, more people will search for homes to buy and rent, which will translate into more people buying appliances and home goods and lead to more jobs for home builders and contractors. Housing is well positioned to continue the great strides already made this year.”