Today, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) released their Existing Home Sales Report for March which continued to indicate that home sales, despite the significant slide to median selling prices fueling speculative sales of distressed properties in the western region, are continuing to fall.Existing single family home sales were down 5.7% on a year-over-year basis while the median selling price declined a dramatic 11.5% over the same period.
More notably though, the Northeast region now seems to have fully tipped into the major decline phase with single family home sales declining 21.2% on a year-over-year basis with median selling prices declining 19.6% over the same period.
The NAR leadership continues their shameless spin with their chief economist Lawrence Yun suggesting that summer may bring signs of the effects of the governments “homeowner” tax credit and realtor industry bailout.
“Buyer traffic has been rising, and real estate offices are getting phone inquires about the tax credit, … By early summer we should be seeing a positive impact on home sales from record-low mortgage interest rates in addition to the stimulus provisions.”
The following (click for larger versions) are charts showing sales for single family homes, plotted monthly, for 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009 as well as national existing home inventory and month supply.
Below is a chart consolidating all the year-over-year changes reported by NAR in their most recent report.
