A Bottom in Sales, But What About Prices?

The National Association of Realtors (NAR) announced Friday that existing home sales in July rose 7.2% over June levels (from 4.89 million sales, seasonally adjusted annual rate, to 5.24 million), marking the first time since 2004 that annualized sales have risen four consecutive months.

This is great news for real estate as the market firmly climbs away from its bottom in home sales (low point of about 4.5 million home sales per year) and many are interpreting it as an indication that a bottom in sale prices is not far behind.  As I noted last month though, a key number that we should be keeping our eye on is the inventory level of existing homes for sale.  Digging deeper here, one still finds considerable reason for concern. In June, the troubling issue was that the increase in the pace of existing home sales was almost matched by an increase in the rate at which homes were being added to the existing inventory (i.e., people putting their homes on the market). That month, 521,000 homes were sold and 481,000 homes were added to the for-sale market.

In July, this pattern got even more lopsided with more homes being added than were actually sold during the period. In July, 532,000 homes were sold but 812,000 homes were added to the market (see Figure 1). The net effect of this fact is that inventory levels (number of homes for sale) actually increased from 3,811,000 in June to 4,091,000 in July (a 7.3% increase in inventory compared to an increase of 7.2% in home sales).  Monthly supply – the number of months it would take to work through the inventory of for-sale homes at the current rate of sales – remained unchanged at 9.4 months of supply (see Figure 2).  It would have actually increased were it not for the higher pace of sales.

It’s hard to see where the upward pressure on prices is going to come from near-term given that supply of homes on the market remains so high.  And it could prove hard to push supply levels down with so many foreclosures streaming in and with so many homeowners who’ve been sitting on the sidelines thus far starting now to dip their toes into the market.

Figure 1 below shows the Home Sales versus New Supply and Figure 2 below shows the Zillow Home Value Index and Monthly Supply of Existing Homes for Sale.

Dr. Stan Humphries is a real estate economist and real estate expert for Zillow. Stan is in charge of the data and analytics team at Zillow, which develops housing market data for most major metropolitan statistical areas in the U.S., and provides economic research for current real estate market conditions. He helped create the algorithms for the popular Zestimate® home value and the Zillow Home Value Index (ZHVI).