Citing a shrinking number of homes available on the market, the National Association of REALTORs announced recently that existing home sales fell last month. The lack of availability has also resulted in higher home sales prices.
The NAR reported that existing home sales declined 0.6% from a downwardly revised 4.95 million units in February to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.92 million units. Many economists, hoping there would be a turnaround in the housing market, were disappointed to learn that it failed to meet their expected figure of 5.01 million. The only bright spot was that last month’s numbers were an improvement over last year’s figure of 4.46 million — a 10.3% increase.
Although more homes were on the market, inventory was still tight. The NAR reported that total housing inventory at the end of March rose 1.6% to 1.93 million existing homes for sale, which represents a 4.7-month supply at the current sales pace. That is higher than the previous month’s 4.6-month supply, but lower than when there was a 6.2-month supply 12 months prior.
The median time on the market for all homes was 62 days in March, according to the NAR, down from 74 in February and 91 days in March 2012. Short sales and foreclosures — which comprised of 21% of all existing home sales last month — were on the market for a median of 81 and 46 days, respectively. Further, 37% of all homes were on the market for less than a month.
The national median existing home price last month was $184,300, which is 11.8% higher than the previous March, based on NAR data. This marked the 13th consecutive month of year-over-year gains, the first time since May 2005 to May 2006.