Today, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) released their Existing Home Sales Report for April indicating that home sales are continuing to fall, despite the significant slide to median selling prices, record low interest rates and significant numbers of speculative sales of distressed properties in the western region.Existing single family home sales were down 2.8% on a year-over-year basis while the median selling price declined a dramatic 14.9% over the same period.
More notably though, the Condos now seem to have fully tipped into the major decline phase with sales declining 9.4% on a year-over-year basis with median selling prices declining a whopping 18.5% over the same period.
The NAR leadership continues their shameless spin with their chief economist Lawrence Yun suggesting the Federal Reserve needs to subsidize extravagant home purchases by the most affluent in our society and in turn, bail out the Realtor industry.
“The Federal Reserve needs to help restore liquidity for the jumbo mortgage market by buying these loans under the TALF program.”
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.
