The March Existing Home Sales Data Report | Episode 124 | 04-19-2024

With the latest home sales data, we saw March's unexpected slide in existing home sales that has everyone talking, and we're breaking down the nuances that could change your perspective on the housing market. As spring selling season kicks off, it's not all doom and gloom; we've spotted some bright spots, including a much-needed increase in housing supply. In this episode, we analyze the regional sales fluctuations, the uptick in median home prices after months of decline, and how these factors play into the Fed's approach to inflation and interest rates.

While the Northeast saw a spike in sales, the rest of the country grapples with affordability as mortgage rates and prices climb. We look at stubborn housing price pressures that continue to affect the economy.

We can't seem to get a break here with housing. We've discussed earlier this week some what negative housing data that we got on housing starts and building permits, and we just got the March reading on existing home sales. This fell more than expected. It fell 4.3%. The market was expecting it to decline about 4.1%. Let's dig into some of these details because, again, we need this existing home market to increase. We need to get this moving. This is really where we're stuck here, and we do have a housing shortage. A lot has to stem with the fact that mortgage rates are higher, that people are less inclined to move.

Let's take a look though what this showed us for the month of March, which tends to kick off the spring settling season. The only region that actually saw a rise in sales was the Northeast. It was actually the biggest monthly gain in six months. So that's the positive we can take out of this. The other positive we'll take out of a negative report. I'm going to start with the positives this time instead of the negatives. We did get the biggest monthly increase in the month's supply in about 11 months, and we do need to see this. We need to see more supply out there. We just need to get people out there to be buying this.

So let's take a look. If you look at the median price which is another thing that we're watching very closely we're back now, moving higher. We did have a trend where it was lower for the past seven months, but for the prior two months we've actually seen prices increases. We don't want to see this. We don't want to see prices increase at the same time that mortgage rates are higher. This is going to cause additional volatility and possibly some more weakness here in the housing data. Unfortunately, with the median home price as well, that is a filter into the inflation reports and that's something the Fed has noticed that the housing price pressures continue to be kind of stubborn and keeping that in those inflation indicators higher.

Now it's Thursday April 18th. The market doesn't really seem to care about these negative reports on the markets up today. We will be back next week when we have plenty more information and economic data and we also will get some more from an earnings perspective. So we'll be back next week to report about that. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to reach out to podcast at verdence dot com. Thank you.