the faltings height is a useful invariant for addressing questions in arithmetic geometry. in his celebrated proof of the mordell and shafarevich conjectures, faltings shows the faltings height satisfies a certain northcott property, which allows him to deduce his finiteness statements. in this work we prove a new northcott property for the faltings height. namely we show, assuming the colmez conjecture and the artin conjecture, that there are finitely many cm abelian varieties of a fixed dimension which have bounded faltings height. the technique developed uses new tools from integral p-adic hodge theory to study the variation of faltings height within an isogeny class of cm abelian varieties. in special cases, we are able to use these techniques to moreover develop new colmez-type formulas for the faltings height.