The National Association of Realtors released its Pending Home Sales report and it showed that signed contracts were down by 4.6% in October, which was in line with estimates. However, there was a positive revision to the September report. When we factor in that revision from the originally reported figure, Pending Home Sales were actually down only 3%. Year over year, sales are now down 37%. That reading does factor in peak interest rates. We feel that the readings could get better when considering rates have come down over 0.5% since then and appear to have the potential to go lower.
The National Association of Realtors Chief Economist, Lawrence Yun, stated that he believes we should start to see buyers return to the market and activity should increase. And we are seeing activity start to return in purchase applications. Purchase applications have actually increased for the past four weeks in a row! It’s prevalent how demand has been cooling due to higher interest rates, but if interest rates start to decrease due to a lessening of inflation, we may start seeing demand for purchases start to accelerate.
Source : https://bit.ly/3uhHFTI
By: Jon Iacono