Tausi Insider

The housing market slump deepened in November as sales of previously occupied U.S. homes slowed for the tenth consecutive month – the longest such stretch on records going back to 1999. Existing home sales fell 7.7 per cent last month from October to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.09 million, the National Association of Realtors said Wednesday. That’s a slower sales pace than what economists had expected, according to FactSet. Sales plunged 35.4 per cent from November last year. Excluding the steep sales downturn that occurred in May 2020 at the start of the pandemic, sales are now at the slowest annual pace since November 2010, when the housing market was mired in the aftermath of the foreclosure crisis of the late 2000s. Still, home prices continued to rise last month, though at a far smaller rate than just a few months ago. The national median home sales price rose 3.5 per cent in November from a year earlier, to $370,700. Nearly a quarter of homes that sold last month fet...

A sold sign stands outside a home in Wyndmoor, Pa., on June 22, 2022. Matt Rourke/The Associated Press U.S. home sales tumbled to the slowest pace in nearly a decade as soaring mortgage rates and sky high prices in 2022 pushed homeownership out of reach for many Americans. The National Association of Realtors said Friday that existing U.S. home sales totalled 5.03 million last year, a 17.8 per cent decline from 2021. That is the weakest year for home sales since 2014 and the biggest annual decline since 2008, during the housing crisis of the late 2000s. The median national home price for all of last year jumped 10.2 per cent to $386,300, the NAR said, and it’s up 42 per cent from 2019, before ultralow mortgage rates and pandemic-fueled demand sent the market into a frenzy. That translates to a median $114,000 increase in housing wealth in three years. “So, homeowners have done well during this housing (market) from 2019 through Covid until now,” said Lawrence Yun, the NAR’s chief eco...