Pending home sales hit 20-year low
With higher mortgage rates at the top of homebuyers minds, fewer people are buying houses.
Yahoo Finance’s Dani Romero reports:
Contract signings for existing homes logged their slowest pace in more than two decades in October.
Home sales under contract dropped 1.5% from the month before, according to the National Association of Realtors on Thursday. The 71.4 index reading is the lowest since the index’s founding in 2001. An index level of 100 is equal to the pace of contract activity in 2001.
Still, the results were better than the 2.0% decline that Bloomberg economists had estimated and come after a bigger slide in new home sales that same month.
The drop in the index, a leading gauge used to assess the housing market’s health, still reflects how rising rates in October again unnerved budget-sensitive buyers and pushed pending sales in the resale market down by 8.5% annually.
“Rates were hovering around 8% in October. They were the highest in 23 years, which pushed affordability to a record low,” RSM US real estate senior analyst Crystal Sunbury told Yahoo Finance ahead of the release. “We’ll see pending home sales falling accordingly in October.”
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