Home Sales Up

Sales of existing homes in the USA went down by 1.99% last month, from 5.03 million homes to 4.93 million homes. That's a little more than December, but well below last March (2007), by 19.31%.

Sales Pace by Region

For month to month changes, sales in half the USA was up and half of it was down.

In the Northeast and West, the sales pace was up by 2.25% and 2.17%, respectively. In the Midwest sales were slower by -6.45% and in the South they were down -3.52%.

Nationwide though, the sales pace was down by -19.31% compared to last year. The regional declines were: West -22.31%, South -20,00%, Northeast -18.75%, and Midwest -15.94%.

Next Report & Definitions

April sales pace figures will be released at the very end of May.

This measure tracks units - condominiums, co-ops, and single family home. What "sales pace" means is that the National Association of Realtors calculates how many homes were sold, makes adjustments for seasonal factors like weather, school, vacations, then calculates how many homes would sell in a year at that given pace. When we use raw data, we try to state that clearly.

The median average is the "midpoint" sales price. Half the homes were sold above that price and half below.

Home Prices Fall

Nationally, the median average sales price fell compared to last year, down nationally by -7.68%, to a median average of $200,700. The Northeast showed a slight gain of sales price to 4.56%, while the rest showed drops -- West -14.72%, South -7.06% and the Midwest by -5.33%.

We compare values to the same period a year ago. We do not use month-to-month comparisons because there are sometimes huge fluctuations in the size of houses that sell in different seasons. Larger houses sell during the summer when it is more convenient for families to move.

Inventory Up

It would take 9.9 months to sell all the homes currently available on the market. That is up, and you can blame most of that on a slower sales pace. Although, there were actually 40,000 more homes available for sale, a total of of 4,058,000 homes. That's way too many for this market.

Inventory is measured in two ways. "How many homes are available for sale?" and "How many months would it take to sell the total number of homes available for sale right now, at the current sales pace?"