NAR Existing Home Sales Data Up for 3rd Straight Month

The stock market sure liked the June Existing Home Sales Report issued this morning by NAR, the National Association of Realtors. (The DOW climbed past 9,000 today.) Nationally, seasonally adjusted existing home sales grew 3.6% over May, the third month in a row of sales growth.

In looking over the regional data, I was half expecting that all of the uptick could be attributed to the south and west (where foreclosure sales have pushed prices way down, and the lower prices stimulated demand), and here in the northeast we'd still be behind the eight ball and experiencing a sales drop. But June's seasonally adjusted sales numbers were up 2.5% over May (but still down 4.7% over June 2008.) On the price front, June's median sales price of $249,400 was off 5.9% from June, 2008, but up 10.8% from the 12 month low of $230.700 in March of this year.

This latest NAR report seems to the jiving with what I'm seeing, with a sales pick up from the mid-winter doldrums.

Comments

[Yousef]

Dave,
It's flat up here.

Run the sold numbers for Sullivan from 7/1/2009 through today.

26 home sales.

Rounding up the closing sold numbers.

Median price is:

$127,500.

Unless you get a few closings in the next week over 225k and less foreclosures (less than 90k) - sold prices for the month will stay under 130k.

Regards,
Yousef

[David Knudsen]

That's exactly why I don't use single month data, and always rely on 3 month data periods to draw any trend conclusions. Remember, the median is the price at which 50% of the houses have sold for less and 50% for more. With only 25 or 26 data points, the median can be highly volatile, affected significantly by just one or two sales. So if the next two sales come in above $152,500, it will pull the median up 2 spots in the list of sales --- to $152,500 (which is the sale two above the current median.) Two lower and it would drop to $123,500.