The housing market faces ferocious headwinds.
By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.
Pending sales of existing homes of all types in April – contracts on houses, condos, etc., that were signed in April but that haven’t closed yet – collapsed by 33.8% from April last year, after having plunged 16.3% year-over-year in March, with the index plunging to 69, according to the National Association of Realtors today. An index value of 100 represents the pending sales level of January 2001.
Pending sales are an indication of what closed sales will look like a month or two down the road. So this is an indication of the direction that May’s closed sales are heading into.
We already know how pending sales in March translated into closed sales in April. Pending home sales for March had plunged 16.3%