Well whaddya know, the resale US housing market evidenced a pulse in Tuesday’s update on the marquee measure of existing home sales.

After a veritable crash the prior month, closings showed a small gain for February, surprising economists who (rationally) expected another drop.

The 1.7% increase hardly counts as inspiring, but as the figure below reminds you, this is a series where anything that isn’t overtly bad is good.

January’s setback which, as originally reported, counted among the worst monthly declines since 2020, was revised to show a shallower, but still steep, slide.

The annualized sales pace is pitiably slow. NAR chief economist Lawrence Yun didn’t dance around the issue. “Despite the modest gain, actual housing demand remains muted,” he said Tuesday, adding that the figures are particularly disappointing in the context of lower financing costs and wage growth that’s “outpacing home price growth by almost four percentage points.”

Yes. Yes twice. I concur, and I’ve said as much on too many occasions to count over the last six or so months.

Consider: On the Case-Shiller price measures, home price growth has undershot inflation for seven months running, sellers outnumber buyers by nearly 50% and mortgage rates are ~80bps lower from last year’s highs.

Despite all of that, we still can’t sustain a meaningful uptick in sales volume. That tells you how far gone America is on the affordability math.

The median existing home price was below $400,000 for a second month, but as the figure shows, annual price growth’s ongoing. February marked 32 months in a row.

Don’t forget: That streak’s on top of the original pandemic bonanza. The two price-growth streaks are separated by a fleeting, shallow series of declines which ended during the summer of 2023.

“Housing affordability is improving [but] there’s a long way to go,” Yun went on, in the same Tuesday press release, adding that although “there are six million more jobs than in 2019, home sales per year are down by one million.”