May home sales up over April, down from 2008, Realtors group says

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The National Assn. of Realtors reports today that ‘sales of existing homes showed another gain in May, benefiting from favorable affordability conditions and a first-time buyer tax credit.’

May sales were up 2.4% over April but down 3.6% from last year’s pace. The NAR uses a seasonally adjusted annual sales pace to state the sales totals. May’s pace would lead to 4.77 million home sales this year.

Looking at the actual number of homes sold, rather than the seasonally adjusted annual projections used by NAR, we see the 451,000 homes sold in May are down 6.6% from May last year and up 9.2% over April.

May’s sales pace trails last May’s seasonally adjusted forecast of 4.95 million homes sold; it is also behind the 4.91 million homes that ended up being sold in 2008. The raw data also show sales in the West are up from last year, by 8.7%. The national total was dragged down by year-over-year sales declines in the Northeast (-13.4%), the South (-11.1%) and the Midwest (-8.5%).

May is typically a strong sales month, and May sales last year were up over April as well.

The NAR also notes in its news release that first-time home buyers made up 29% of sales, ‘nearly 10 percentage points higher than a year ago.’ The NAR did not mention that figure was down from the 40% market share of first-time home buyers they reported in April.

The median sales price in May was $173,000, down 16.8% from May a year ago.

You can read the NAR home sales release here.

-- Peter Y. Hong