The national housing market's ongoing, slow march back to "normal" is continuing into the start of 2019 — setting up a spring in which buyers will have more power than they have in years, although they still may need to work hard to find a favorable deal.

House prices climbed 4.3 percent in January from a year early, down 4.6 percent from the prior month, according to the Case-Shiller home price index. The last time it advanced this slowly was April 2015.

Las Vegas, Phoenix and Minneapolis clocked the highest year-over-year gains on Case-Shiller’s 20-city composite, with annual growth of 10.5 percent, 7.5 percent and 5.1 percent, respectively.

Formerly scorching hot, in-demand markets have seen home value growth steadily slow over the past few months. In Seattle, annual price gains dropped from 12.8 percent to 4.1 percent from January 2018 to January 2019. San Francisco saw annual price increases shrink from 10.2 percent to 1.8 percent over the same time period.

Inventory levels continue to increase gradually, recovering from historic lows – an increasingly promising turn of events for buyers who had been starved for choice for years. And mortgage rates, continuing to retreat from recent peaks, appear primed to stay low for the foreseeable future.

This all puts would-be buyers in a far more favorable position than last spring. But don't cry for sellers: Prices are still growing, inventory remains incredibly low relative to demand, and buyers are out there in droves competing amongst themselves. The recent slowdown, then, should be viewed more as a healthy rebalancing than a dramatic shift in trends or an impending sign that the strong fundamentals the housing market is enjoying are about to collapse.

Here’s Zillow’s forecast for Case-Shiller’s February data release, which is scheduled for release on April 30.

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