January's Existing Home Sales

Oddly, there were no major government agency economic reports released during the past week, which usually only happens once a year, during Christmas week….hence, the only widely watched private report released during the week was the Existing Home Sales Report for January from the National Association of Realtors (NAR)…this week did see the release of the Chicago Fed’s National Activity Index (CFNAI) for January, a weighted composite index of 85 different economic metrics, which rose to +0.23 in January from +0.02 in December, which was revised from the –0.15 reported for December last month… after revisions, the 3 month average of the CFNAI rose to –0.02 in January from –0.14 in December, which, as a reading close to zero, indicates that national economic activity has been close to the historical trend over the recent months…

Existing Home Sales Rose 3.1% in January; Median Sales Price Fell 7.6% from June

The National Association of Realtors (NAR) reported that existing home sales rose by 3.1% from December to January on a seasonally adjusted basis, projecting that 4.00 million existing homes would sell over an entire year if the January home sales pace were extrapolated over that year, a pace that was still 1.7% below the 4.07 million annual sales rate projected in January of a year ago...December's home sales are now shown to have been running at a 3.88 million annual rate, revised up from the 3.78 million annual rate indicated by last month's report, which had been a 28 year low.....

the NAR also reported that the median sales price for all existing-home types was $379,100 in January, 5.1% higher than in January a year earlier, which they report is "the seventh consecutive month of year-over-year price gains." even though sales prices have actually fallen for seven consecutive months...the NAR press release, which is titled "Existing-Home Sales Rose 3.1% in January", is in easy to read plain English, so if you're interested in more details on housing inventories, cash sales, distressed sales, first time home buyers, etc., you can easily read about those things in that press release...as sales of existing properties do not add to our national output, neither these home sales nor the prices for which these homes sell are included in GDP, except insofar as real estate, local government and banking services are rendered during the selling process…

Since this report is seasonally adjusted and at a not very informative annual rate, we usually take a look at the raw data overview (pdf) to see what actually happened during the month...this unadjusted data indicates that roughly 234,000 homes sold in January, down by 21.2% from the 297,000 homes that sold in December, but up 1.3% from the 231,000 homes that sold in January of last year, so we can see how a large mid-winter seasonal adjustment boosted the reported headline sales up to a positive figure...that same pdf indicates that the median home selling price for all housing types fell 0.6% over the month, the 7th consecutive decrease, from a revised $381,400 in December to $379,100 in January, which was also down 7.6% from the $410,100 median sales price recorded in June, but still up 5.1% from the median sales figure of $360,800 in January of 2023....for those interested in both seasonally adjusted and unadjusted graphs and additional commentary on this report, see the following two posts from Bill McBride at Calculated Risk: NAR: Existing-Home Sales Increased to 4.00 million in January and NAR: Existing-Home Sales Increased to 4.00 million SAAR in January; Median Prices Down 8.4% from Peak NSA…

  

(the above is the synopsis that accompanied my regular sunday morning news links emailing, which in turn was mostly selected from my weekly blog post on the global glass onion…if you’d be interested in receiving my weekly emailing of selected links, most of which are picked from the aforementioned GGO posts, contact me…)