December’s existing home sales

The only widely watched report released during the past week was the Existing Home Sales report for December from the National Association of Realtors (NAR)….in addition, this week also saw results from another regional Fed manufacturing survey for January: the Kansas City Fed manufacturing survey for January, covering western Missouri, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Wyoming and northern New Mexico, reported its broadest composite index remained at -5 in January, same as in December, but down from -4 in November, indicating that a small plurality that region’s manufacturers continued to see deteriorating business conditions in January…

Existing Home Sales Rose 2.2% in December; 2024 Sales Lowest on Record

The National Association of Realtors (NAR) reported that their seasonally adjusted tabulation of existing home sales rose by 2.2% from November to December, after rising by 4.8% in November, projecting that 4.24 million existing homes would sell over an entire year if the December home sales pace were extrapolated over that year, a pace that was also 9.3% above the annual sales rate they projected in December of a year ago, which had been a 28 year low.…November sales were at a 4.15 million annual rate, unrevised from the annual rate indicated by last month’s report…for the entire year, existing home sales totaled 4,060,000, the lowest level in nearly 30 years, down 0.7% from the 4,090,000 existing homes that sold in 2022. and down 1.9% from the 5,030,000 homes that were sold in 2022…the inventory of existing homes on the market fell to 1,150,000 by the end of December, down 13.5% from November but up 15.0% from a year earlier, which is the equivalent of a 3.3 month supply at the current sales pace…

The NAR also reported that the median sales price for all existing-home types was at $404,400 in December, which was 6.0% higher than the median sales price in December a year earlier, as homes in all four regions saw price increases…..the NAR press release, which is titled “Existing-Home Sales Ascended 2.2% in December“, 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 find them 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 for are directly included in GDP, except insofar as real estate, local government and banking services are rendered during the selling process…

Since this report is entirely seasonally adjusted and at a not very informative annual rate, we like to look at the raw data overview (pdf) to see what actually transpired during the month…this unadjusted data indicates that roughly 329,000 homes sold in December, up by 4.4% from the 315,000 homes that sold in November, and 10.8% more than the 297,000 homes that sold in December of last year, so we can see that the impact of the seasonal adjustment on the annualized published figures was downward for this month….that same pdf indicates that the median home selling price for all housing types was unchanged at $404,400 in December, the 6th consecutive month without an increase, and down 5.3% from the revised $426,900 median selling price in June. while for the year as a whole, the median home sales price was at $407,500, up 4.7% from the median sales prices of $389,300 in 2023, and 5.5% higher than the $386,400 median sales price of 2022….

For both seasonally adjusted and unadjusted graphs and additional commentary on this report, see the following posts from Bill McBride at Calculated Risk: NAR: Existing-Home Sales Increased to 4.24 million SAAR in December and Newsletter: Existing-Home Sales Increased to 4.24 million SAAR in December which links to his in depth newsletter on Substack…

 

 

(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…)