Recently awakened animal spirits aren’t showing up in existing home sales just yet.

A week after data showed homebuilder sentiment rose to a five-month high in February as falling mortgage rates lured buyers back to a still forbidding market, an updated read on monthly sales came in below consensus.

Existing home sales in January ran at a four million annual rate, short of the 4.1 million economists expected, and the 12th straight monthly decline.

Suffice to say it’s going to take a little more than 90bps off the 30-year fixed to trigger a nationwide home-buying binge.

I suppose this is good news if you’re the Fed and you’re counting on pipeline shelter disinflation to manifest in the CPI series later this year.

A lot depends on geography at this point. As I put it last month, there’s quite a bit of dispersion. “Home sales are bottoming out,” NAR chief economist Lawrence Yun said Tuesday. “Prices vary depending on a market’s affordability.”

On a national basis, the YoY drop in January was almost 37%. That looked, to me anyway, like the largest decline yet.

The median price was $359,000 last month, the NAR said, more than 13% below the record highs seen last summer. The YoY pace of price growth decelerated to just 1.3%.

So, annual price declines may be imminent. If that occurs, it’d snap a record 131 straight months of YoY gains. The YoY rate of price increases has receded every month since May, when it was more than 15%.

Inventories were up double-digits in January from early last year. If you see something that’s been on the market for longer than a couple of months, you can generally get 10% off list, Yun remarked.

And yet, I’d be remiss not to note that the median price is still around 25% above pre-pandemic levels, while mortgage rates, even after falling precipitously from last year’s highs, remain double where they were at the beginning of last year. That doesn’t exactly scream affordability. Or at least it won’t for the “median” US family.