Existing home sales in America managed only the smallest of advances in April, the first of this week’s US macro releases showed.
Closings rose a mere 0.2% from March on the NAR’s gauge, which remains mired in an intractable slump.
The minuscule advance undershot consensus. Economists were hoping (against hope, apparently) for a 2% gain.
NAR chief economist Lawrence Yun described a “modest” uptick attributable to “continued improvement in housing affordability.”
“Affordable” remains a highly relative term in this context. Mortgage rates, while lower from a year ago and off the Iran war peak, remain near 6.50% and prices… well, you know the story there.
The median in Monday’s NAR release was $417,700, up 0.9% from the same month a year ago, a new April record and the highest since August.
As the figure shows, April marked the 34th consecutive month of annual gains, and that’s on top of the pandemic bonanza.
What Yun means when he talks about improving affordability is, mostly, the inflation-adjusted pace of price growth, which has been negative for nine months, according to Case-Shiller.
If price growth’s undershooting headline inflation, it’s likely undershooting wage growth too, which means wage-earners are catching up, however slowly.
“Mortgage rates are lower from a year ago, and average income growth is outpacing home price gains,” Yun said Monday, but cautioned that “inventory remains tight [and] multiple offers, though not as intense as a few years ago, are still occurring.”
Suffice to say US housing remains a market beset on multiple fronts, and on both sides (i.e., buyer and seller) of the equation.
Bottom line: Monday’s NAR release marked an inauspicious start to the spring home-buying season.
I live in a subdivision in a KC suburb that has around 50 homes and is now “full.” So over the fall and winter the developer has begun to double down and build part deux. While the infrastructure is in, not a single home has been started. There are two existing homes for sale but as yet nothing new is on the way. Our traffic has suddenly doubled but it’s not yet serving any new residents. We stalled once before in this area and nothing happened for a couple of years. Several builders have been involved in building in the area but no one has stepped up yet to add anything new.