Existing Home Sales – What Hardtrack Is Telling Us

The National Association of Realtors published figures for existing home sales for April today.

Existing home sales fell in April

The median price of a home fell to $220,900, an 0.8 percent fall from the midpoint selling price a year ago. It marked the ninth straight decline in the median price.

Comparing the national sales median price, $220,900. Checking the median price from Hardtack, it reports the median number as $276,002. Why the difference? Let’s dive into the guts of Hardtack and figure out.

Hardtack works by reading data from the web front end of the MLS systems. This means we are tracking the prices that people are asking for their properties, what they hope to get. Nation wide, in almost every market the inventory keeps climbing higher, over 1.9 Million single family homes on the market as of today. In many places across the US, sellers are asking more than what most buyers can now afford to pay. Either because they think their property is worth more than the market will currently bear, or sadly because they have used modern exotic financing approaches such as cash out re-fi’s and home equity lines of credit and they are trying to sell for how much they owe, which in some cases is more than they can possibly get.

Median Selling Price: $220,900
Median Asking Price: $276,002

That $56,000 gap signals a fundamental sickness in the housing market, one that will need to be worked out over the next few years.

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Category: Economics, Main, Mashups, Recession Watch