Single-family home sales in the West and Midwest show the largest drops Most of the housing market?s ills can be traced to one cause?there simply aren?t enough homes for sale to satisfy demand. It?s driving home prices and rents up, affordability down, and according to new data from the National Association of Realtors, sales way down.
Existing home sales dropped in January by 3.2 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate (SAAR) of 5.38 million compared to December. Compared to January of last year, it?s even worse?a 4.8 percent decline. That?s the largest annual decline since August of 2014.
And sales are lagging because housing inventory continues to shrink. While supply was up 4.1 percent compared to a month ago to 1.52 million existing homes for sale, it was down a whopping 9.5 percent from January of last year, the 32nd consecutive month of year-over-year inventory declines. ?A second month in a row of lackluster existing home sales is not an ideal way to begin 2018,? wrote Aaron Terrazas, an economist at Zillow. ?Low inventory also continues to weigh on the market, and shows precious few signs of easing...There simply needs to be more inventory available to buy.?
The monthly decline in existing home sales was felt most in the single-family home markets in the West and Midwest. In the West, the SAAR of 1 million single-family home sales was a 5.7 percent drop compared to a month ago, while the Midwest?s SAAR of 1.17 million single-family sales was a 6.4 percen...