Sun State Savings

Sales of exist­ing homes rose in April, buoyed by an expir­ing home buyer tax credit and excep­tion­ally low mort­gage rates.

As com­pared to March, April’s Exist­ing Home Sales rose by 410,000 units nation­wide — the sec­ond straight month of large gains. An “exist­ing home” is a home resold by a prior owner (i.e. not new construction).

It’s a solid report for hous­ing over­all, with ris­ing sales sug­gest­ing that the real estate market’s recov­ery is ongo­ing. How­ever, the data pre­sented a mixed message.

Accord­ing to the National Asso­ci­a­tion of Real­tors®, although the num­ber of homes sold ticked higher in April,  so did the sup­ply of exist­ing homes for sale, too.

Sell­ers are now list­ing homes faster than buy­ers can buy them.

After adding another 0.3 months of sup­ply in April, resale home sup­ply is nearly two full months larger than at Novem­ber 2009’s low-point. This put down­ward pres­sure on home prices.

Fur­ther­more, because 49% of April’s buy­ers were first-time buy­ers and the tax credit has since ended, we can expect that sell­ers will con­tinue to out­weigh buy­ers in the months ahead.

It presents an inter­est­ing oppor­tu­nity for June’s home buy­ers. Mort­gage rates are still at their low­est lev­els of the year — despite expert pre­dic­tions to the con­trary — and homes remain afford­able. Plus, in a lot of mar­kets, home val­ues have started to creep higher.

There’s good val­ues and good rates but nei­ther should last long. For the next few weeks, real estate may be in its 2010 sweet spot. 

If you were think­ing of mov­ing in Sep­tem­ber of this year or later, con­sider mov­ing up your timeframe.

Tags: Existing Home Sales,NAR,Home Supply

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 25th, 2010 at 12:55 pm and is filed under Existing Home Sales. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.