November Existing Home Sales Remain Flat According To Auction.com Residential Real Estate Nowcast

IRVINE AND SILICON VALLEY, Calif., Dec. 3, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Auction.com, LLC, the nation's leading online real estate marketplace, has released its latest Auction.com Residential Real Estate Nowcast which projects that existing home sales for the month of November will fall between seasonally adjusted annual rates of 5.19 and 5.54 million annual sales, with a targeted number of 5.36 million – relatively flat from October, though up 8.4 percent year-over-year.

"People looking to buy a home today face dual constraints - extraordinarily low inventory and extremely tight credit," said Auction.com Executive Vice President Rick Sharga. "But demand may be weakening as well, since the number of first-time homebuyers continues to be lower than normal, and purchases by investors - especially investors from China and Europe - appear to be slowing down a little bit as well. It will be interesting to see what happens to demand if the Fed raises rates in December and lenders respond by hiking mortgage interest rates."

Earlier this month, the National Association of Realtors® (NAR®) released its existing home sales data for October, reporting a 3.4 percent decrease in home sales to 5.36 million units, a 3.9 percent increase from the year-ago level and well within the range of 5.26 – 5.51 million units that Auction.com predicted last month.

Existing home sales gains have stalled since May, averaging a 5.45 million annual sales pace and ranging between 5.30 million in August and 5.58 million in July. This period of pause comes as little surprise, according to Auction.com Chief Economist Peter Muoio, who noted that the plateau corresponds with a soft spot in the economy, some downshifting in job growth, and the financial market turbulence experienced in late summer.

"The renewed strength of the labor market, including accelerating wage gains, should be good news for the housing market heading into 2016," said Muoio. "We continue to look for higher home prices to coax more sellers into the market. Along with wages, this could be an important new ingredient to the 2016 housing story." 

Existing home prices now stand at a new cyclical high and continue to close in on the pre-bust all-time high of a seasonally adjusted $229,875 posted in July 2011. NAR recently reported a 5.8 percent year-over-year increase in median existing home prices in October to $219,600 – within the range of $214,269 - $236,824 that Auction.com predicted last month. Findings from the Auction.com Real Estate Nowcast suggest that sales prices for existing homes will fall between $214,057 and $236,589 in the month of November, with a targeted price of $225,323. This represents an 8.7 percent year-over-year increase.

About the Auction.com Residential Real Estate Nowcast Model

The Auction.com Residential Real Estate Nowcast combines industry data, proprietary company transactional data and Google search activity to predict market trends as they are occurring – weeks before the findings of other benchmark studies are released. Building upon the groundbreaking work by Google Chief Economist Hal Varian, Auction.com's nowcast model extends a traditional autoregressive-forecasting model to incorporate contemporaneous information that provides significantly enhanced accuracy.

Auction.com will occasionally update its nowcast as fresh data provides additional signals for current home sales activity. The Auction.com Residential Real Estate Nowcast model has proven highly accurate across 2015.

Existing Home Sales

Sources: Google, NAR, Auction.com

Existing Home Sales Pricing

Sources: Google, NAR, Auction.com

About Auction.com:  
Auction.com, LLC, is the nation's leading online real estate marketplace. Founded in 2007, the company has sold more than $34 billion in residential and commercial real estate assets. Auction.com has over 900 employees and headquarters in Irvine and Silicon Valley, California, as well as offices in key markets nationwide. Visit www.auction.com for more information.

SOURCE Auction.com, LLC

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