So much for that?

For a few months, it looked as though the resale US housing market had finally turned a corner after spending the better part of three years mired in what ultimately became a historic slump. Alas, data released Thursday appeared to suggest the nascent recovery lost momentum in March.

Existing home sales fell 5.9% last month, the NAR said. That was more than double the expected decline and the largest month-to-month drop since November of 2022. The 4.02 million pace was the slowest for any March since the financial crisis.

You can’t blame inventory anymore. Not really. There were 1.33 million used homes for sale at the end of last month, up more than 8% from February and 20% more than March of 2024.

The problem’s simple: Between elevated financing costs and record-high prices, people just can’t afford to buy. At some point last year, what was left of the relatively moneyed, credit-good fence-sitters took the plunge. By that I mean there appeared to be a pool of well-qualified buyers waiting on rates to drop further, but when, instead, rates started to rise anew following the first Fed cut, those folks signed on the dotted line.

Now, seemingly, everyone with the financial wherewithal to make the math work is in the door, leaving the market to those for whom the numbers simply don’t add up. First-time buyers accounted for fewer than one in three sales, unchanged from a year ago and well below the historical norm.

NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun was despondent. “Home buying and selling remained sluggish in March due to affordability challenges,” he said Thursday, on the way to delivering what, for him, counted as a wholly grim assessment: “Residential housing mobility, currently at historical lows, signals the troublesome possibility of less economic mobility for society.”

I only “know” Yun from the color accompanying NAR’s press releases, so I could be mischaracterizing here, but I gotta tell you: I’ve never heard him offer such a fatalistically dour assessment.

Although price appreciation slowed markedly last month, the median sales price for existing homes in America nevertheless hit a four-month high, and at $403,700, notched a new all-time record for March.

The YoY increase, 2.7%, was the slowest since August. But prices have posted 21 straight YoY gains.

The good news is that if you’re lucky enough to own a house, you’re insulated to a certain extent from the turmoil in equities and Treasurys. “In a stark contrast to the stock and bond markets, household wealth in residential real estate continues to reach new heights,” Yun went on, in the same press release, noting that for every percentage point gain in home prices, household balance sheets in America enjoy a half-trillion-dollar fillip.

Again, though, there’s a palpable sense among industry observers like Yun that we’re reaching the point beyond which the benefits that accrue to homeowners from never-ending price appreciation in the presence of “sticky”-higher mortgage rates are outweighed by the deleterious societal consequences of the accompanying affordability crisis.

As Yun put it, “a small deceleration in home price gains, which were slightly below wage-growth increases in March, would be a welcome improvement for affordability.”

On Redfin’s data, prices rose 0.2% MoM in March nationally, the slowest sequential rate since December of 2022. On a YoY basis, prices were up 4.6%, according to Redfin’s tally, slower than February’s pace, and the 11th straight month during which annual price growth decelerated.