Name: Housing Prices Rise at Fastest Pace in 15 Months: January’s Existing Home Sales
Uploaded: 2024-02-22T17:41:00Z
Duration: 15 min 4 s
Description: Prices jumped in January, as the market bounced back from the weakest year for existing home sales in almost 30 years. We’ll dig into the January data from the National Association of Realtors to see how the real-estate market started 2024. Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg News

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Prices jumped in January, as the market bounced back from the weakest year for existing home sales in almost 30 years. We’ll dig into the January data from the National Association of Realtors to see how the real-estate market started 2024. Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg News

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Housing Prices Rise at Fastest Pace in 15 Months: January’s Existing Home Sales

Hey, everyone. Welcome, welcome, welcome in to "Market Takes." I know you could have been anywhere in the world, but you're here with me. I appreciate that. I am Dion Rabouin, reporter at "The Wall Street Journal." Today we are getting into the Existing Home Sales report from January, the latest report on the housing market. A lot of news to talk through. A lot of really interesting pieces of this report. We are gonna talk through what the Existing Home Sales report showed and how it compared to expectations. I think the big news in this month's report is about prices, so we're gonna dig into that a little bit today. We're gonna talk about the current state of the US housing market, so we'll go big picture. We'll also get into the minutia, get into the details, "go granular," as one of my old bosses used to say. We're gonna talk about the relationship between the housing market and inflation, talk about what could be on the horizon for both. I think this report really gives us some new things to think about when it comes to inflation. We're gonna check in on the markets, of course, as we always do here on "Market Takes." And of course we're gonna talk about what comes next because we are always looking forward, even though this is backward-looking data. So, first things, let's get the chart up here on your screen. You know we love charts here on "Market Takes." This is what we're seeing when we look at the Existing Home Sales report. So you see from 2021, just a real just precipitous decline to where we are today. But if you look over there on the right side of your screen, you see that is going up. You see prices... Not prices, excuse me. You see the number of homes sold. So that estimated average for what we'll see through the year picked up to exactly 4 million. That was a 3.1% increase from the previous month in terms of the year-over-year pace. Now, December was actually revised upward from 3.78 million to 3.88 million, so that number doing even better. And what you can kind of see here in this chart is it looks like 2023 was just a rough year for the housing market. There were not a lot of people buying. Now, this is all about the number of homes sold, the number of existing homes sold, and what you're seeing here is just a solid slump for the housing market into 2023. But that pickup you see there at the end, 2024, that could be real. And I want to put another chart up here and just kind of zoom out a little bit. So this takes us back to January, 2014, right? So as you can see, we are still well below the pace we were at from that 2014 up through the pandemic. And you know, things get a little wild and wacky there. But when you look at 2014 through about 2020, you see solidly over 5 million homes average for the year from that time, and we are still well below that. But again, this also gives you a bit more insight in that big pickup that we did see this month in terms of January number of homes sold. And that chart just illustrating that, again, while we are still well below where we were, certainly in 2021, 2022 when the housing market was just kind of booming like crazy, where we are right now is not that far off from where we normally are. And it looks like the housing market could be recovering. Throw a couple numbers at you. Sales of single family homes up 3.4% from the month before, but condos and co-ops were flat. Multi-family doing all right. The median price of an existing home was $379,100, down from 381,400 the month before, but, big but here, the median price 5.1% higher year-over-year so up 5% from where prices were January, 2023. That's important. We're gonna talk about that in just a moment. This was the seventh consecutive month that we saw year-over-year price increases. Again, that trend of price increases is back in a big way. We'll get into that in just a minute. This also beat expectations. Economists were predicting 3.96 million, so not a big beat but a beat nonetheless, meaning more homes sold, prices down from the month before, but up 5.1% from the year before so we're seeing more homes sold, higher prices. That's really the theme that you see in this Existing Home Sales report. Want to quote from the report, read you this quote from the report. National Association of REALTORS Chief Economist Lawrence Yun. NAR is the organization that puts out this report. Lawrence says, "While home sales remain sizably lower than a couple of years ago, January's monthly gain is the start of more supply and demand." More supply and more demand. Those are the two keys I'm gonna talk to you about why what Lawrence said could be really important in terms of not just what's going on in real estate, not just what's going on in the housing market, but what's happening in inflation, what's happening in the overall economy, what's going on in markets. We'll get into all that in just a minute, but let's talk really quickly. Let's break down the current state of the US housing market. So, last year you saw the lowest number of homes sold since 1995. That's big. That's a big drop. That's almost 30 years since we saw this few homes sold. And remember, we had that chart up there. You saw we're much lower than where we were, but we're moving back towards that trend line of around 5 million homes sold per year. Last year, lowest number of homes sold since 1995. This report suggests, and when you see that arrow kind of ticking up, you see the trend line starting to tick up, housing market could be picking up steam. That's what Lawrence Yun from NAR is saying. Now, keep in mind the National Association of REALTORS, they like for people to buy houses 'cause their clients make money off selling houses. So they're not an unbiased or a party that, you know, is just sitting on the sidelines. They do want to, you know, present the idea that the housing market is looking clean and looking good, but also this data suggests that we could be seeing a sizable pickup. Two big things are happening right now when we talk about the housing market. First is that prices are consistently rising. That 5.1% year-over-year increase in January, the largest since October of 2022 when prices rose 6.5%. So again, we haven't seen anything like this since the fall of 2022. That's a significant amount of time. National Association of REALTORS told me that in an email earlier today. Percentage increase has risen consistently since May of 2023. So up until May, you saw prices coming down year-over-year. Prices were diving. As sales were coming down, people just weren't buying, prices were going down. Ever since then, you've seen prices kind of steadily start to climb back. So prices were down -2.9% from the year before in May of '23. They've consistently risen higher than that. And now in July, well sorry, in July, we got prices up 1.7% and they've been higher ever since then. And now we're at 5.1% for January, so from -2.9% in May of 2023, 1.7% gain in July of 2023 and price increases every single month since then. Now we're up 5.1% year-over-year. The trend is consistent. Prices are going up. They are not coming down. They're not slowing down. They are picking up. You're picking up steam in terms of those price increases. The second thing that's happening is the year-over-year decline in terms of the number of homes sold, that's decreasing. So you still have a lower number of homes sold this month in January of 2024 than you did in January of 2023, but that's declining. So in April of 2023, we saw a 23.7% year-over-year decline.

23.7% compared to 2022. Well now, that shrunk every single month since April of 2023. And now we're seeing just a -1.7% increase in terms of the number of homes sold year-over-year. So again, prices up, sales still down, but still down just a little bit. And again, that number is declining. So it was -23.7% in April of '23, and now it's just -1.7%. Shows you people are returning to the market, they're paying good money, prices are rising, sales are moving more quickly. And again, this goes to what Lawrence Yun said, supply and demand are increasing. That's what he's expecting to see for the year. So this report really just showing us that the very bad year that the housing market had in 2023, just objectively bad for buyers, for sellers, for people that just like to come by and look at homes, bad year, that could be coming to an end. And this report that we got for the start of 2024 really suggests that that's the theme. Prices are rising, sales are rising. Again, it's all about the return of supply and the return of demand that could put prices higher, start to push some more sales in this market, even though we are not seeing a significant decline in mortgage rates. The new mortgage rates from Fannie Mae, or sorry, the new mortgage rates from Freddie Mac just out at noon today. Let's see if I can get this to load. 6.9%. So mortgage rates actually increased today. They were 6.77% last week. I think we've got a two-week increase. Yep, back-to-back weeks of increases from the Freddie Mac mortgage. That's the average mortgage rate for the 30-year mortgage, that's been going up consistently for the past couple weeks. We're getting back toward that 7% level. So again, what we're seeing, even though mortgage rates are still high, people are still buying, folks are still spending money, prices are still going up. That's the overall theme. Zillow co-founder Spencer Rascoff told me a couple months ago on the podcast that real estate agents were really starting to see the housing market pick up significantly earlier in the year. Really, they were expecting a big pickup to start after the Super Bowl. Well, Super Bowl just happened a couple weeks ago. This could really be an acceleration in the housing market. Now, why does this matter beyond just folks who are looking to buy a house? This matters for everything because housing prices affect not just what homeowners and home buyers pay. They affect what those folks offer that price out, offer that house out for rent. So if I buy a house and I wanna rent it out, and I just paid a higher price, well, I'm gonna rent it out for a higher price. And this goes right to inflation. And the biggest contributor to inflation last month, according to the CPI, the Consumer Price Index, was housing. In fact, let's put a chart up here on your screen right now so I can show you what I'm talking about when it comes to CPI. So what you see there in 2022, prices were rising at about 9% versus the year before, and we've come down pretty significantly. But if you look at the right hand side of your screen, you see prices kind of picking back up, coming back down, and then picking back up. Prices have not come down to that 2% target that the Federal Reserve has. When you look there at the beginning of 2021 when this inflation wave really started up, we're not back there yet. And I think a lot of folks had been expecting us to get there pretty quickly. And what we've seen from this Existing Home Sales report today suggests that maybe we aren't going to get there as quick as expected. Now, inflation was higher than expected for January, 3.1% versus 2.9% expected. And that report really showed a lot of folks that inflation's not dead. You saw a little bit of a market selloff the day of and the day after, but I think the market may be counting out the importance of housing. It was about 60% of what drove up overall inflation in the last CPI report. And it likely, again, as long as housing prices keep going up like they are, could continue to hold inflation closer to 3%, maybe push it up back towards 4%, but keep inflation away from 2%. And that's the Fed's target, and that's what matters to the market. So this chart just illustrating that, again, inflation has not continued that consistent move lower that we were seeing in 2023 and that we had seen really towards the back half of 2023 and coming into this month. That has not continued. PCE is out next week, the Personal Consumption Expenditures report, that's the Fed's favorite inflation gauge. That could move markets. You're gonna wanna be with us on "Market Takes" when we break that down next Thursday. Don't miss it. Don't be a... That's a square. Don't do it. Don't be a square. Let's check in real quick on the markets right now. I'm gonna throw wsj.com up here on your screen so you can see what we're looking at now. That's the bond market, and what we're seeing in the 30-year, we're seeing bond yields lower. I wanna take you over here just to the overview. Let's talk about stocks right now. The Dow, the S&P up big. The NASDAQ up to almost 2.5% on the day. Big day for stocks. Not a lot of response to this Existing Home Sales report, but what you do see is a little bit in the bonds. You had seen really the 10-year kind of picking up and then it went back down after that report was produced. And now we're starting to get back up. Bond yields moving a little higher. Could be expectations for inflation. But look here as you get into what they call the belly of the curve. You see the seven-year note, prices down 23/32. That's a significant move, even though we don't see a big change in the yield. These two-year notes, again, you see the the yield moving up. Expectations for growth, expectation for inflation. Those numbers we saw in the housing market today could be part of that. And that just illustrating, again, that overall investors maybe not quite tapped into this housing market, but I think they should be. And those of you watching "Market Takes," y'all are tapped in. You're seeing what's happening. This could play an effect or have an effect on inflation. And it's all about inflation. It's all about the Federal Reserve, and the Federal Reserve is all about inflation. That means it's all about inflation. That's what you need to be watching if you're not. So listen, let's talk about what comes next. We have the New Home Sales report coming out on Monday. You'll want to watch that because that's that supply that we saw coming into the market. We had seen a real decline in terms of how much supply was coming into the housing market because folks just don't wanna sell their houses. So new home sales got a big boost in 2023 even though existing home sales weren't selling. We'll see if now that we've seen the pickup in existing home sales, do we also continue to see more new home sales? Overall, it's the same market. Folks are paying the same money. You pay a little bit more for a new home than you would for an existing home so that could put more pressure under prices. You'll wanna watch that out. Durable goods report, I think that'll be key. Again, that'll tell us a little bit about inflation. That's out on Tuesday. Consumer Confidence also out on Tuesday. You'll wanna watch that. But the Personal Income and Outlay report, PCE, the latest inflation report, the Fed's favorite inflation report will be out on Thursday. We'll be right here on "Market Takes" breaking it down for you. And for more, check out my podcast "WSJ's Take On the Week." We cut through the noise to explain the major business and financial news that moves markets. Also, you can make smarter investing decisions. Subscribe, listen wherever you get your podcast. That's Spotify, Apple Podcast. You still using the iTunes? Whatever you use, get the podcast "WSJ's Take On the Week." Don't miss it. We're breaking it all down there. Listen, that's gonna do it for us here on "Market Takes." I am Dion Rabouin, reporter at "The Wall Street Journal." Hope you'll be with us when we do it again next time.