Weekly Pending Home Sales Are Finally Above Last Year

After a very disappointing first quarter of the year with home sales failing to climb over 2024’s already anemic levels, signs are finally emerging that we’ve turned the corner to have some growth. This week’s pending home sales count came in just under 69,000 single family homes, which was 2.3% greater than the same week a year ago. That’s really the first week all year where home sales exceeded those of 2024. 

Home sales aren’t strong, of course. But mortgage rates are now below where they were last year at this time. Rates have been generally sliding slower, while last year at this time, rates were rushing to their highest point of the year. So it is in fact fractionally more affordable to buy a home right now than last year at this time. Home prices have not really appreciated any over the past year in most of the country. In many markets home prices are lower than where they were a year ago, so I imagine some buyers are finding opportunity where they have felt thwarted for many years. 

So, home sales are rising. But inventory of unsold homes is rising too. In fact the supply side of the supply/demand equation is moving faster. The weekly new listings count is finally getting back closer to the old normal pre-pandemic levels, and the number of available homes on the market is the most it has been in many years. 

As of now, the complete picture says to me that we should expect home sales to continue slight growth in the second quarter, but as supply grows too, the current pressures on home prices are down, not up, in most parts of the country.  

Every week Altos tracks every home for sale in the country. We analyze all the pricing, supply and demand, and all the changes in that data and we make it available to you before you see it in the traditional channels. If you aren’t using Altos market reports with your clients, your buyers and sellers, now might be the time to step up. Go to altosresearch.com and book a free consult with our team. Because everyone is worried about what’s happening right now. They need you to help them see clearly. The data we cover here in these national videos is available for every zip code in the US. Join us to dive in.

I’m Mike Simonsen, I’m the founder of Altos Research. Let’s look at the data for the week of March 24, 2025. Please refer to the video below for all the charts I mention in this transcript!

Pending Home Sales

Let’s start today with this week’s pending home sales. There were nearly 69,000 new contracts started for single family homes. There were another 14,000 condo sales this week. The week’s pending home sales were up 4% from last week and came in 2.3% greater than the same week a year ago.  I think I mentioned last week in the video that I expected this little threshold to be crossed this week. And the market is moving exactly as I discussed. 

In this chart, the purple line is the 2025 rate of weekly pending home sales. It’s climbing as you’d expect for March. Not skyrocketing but each week in the spring there are more home sales than the week prior. That’s normal.  What’s also visible in the chart is the blue line from last year. Last year the second quarter, and even more so the third quarter were really lousy because mortgage rates moved the wrong direction. So if we’re lucky this year and mortgage rates tick lower, then we should see each week with home sales growth over 2024. 

Easter is late this year so that dip will happen later in April and most of April will come in with home sales growth. However, by the time we get to the third quarter, there are new variables that we haven’t had to deal with in the housing market in many years. For example if the economy continues to slow. We don’t yet have visibility on if or when that puts the brakes on home purchases again. 

For now mostly positive signals in home sales. Two negative notes on the weekly pending home sales numbers though: condo sales are still running below last year. And this may be a signal about the economy. Better financed and better employed folks generally lean towards single family so you can see economic slow down in condo sales first.  And also Florida home sales are still down year over year. The Florida market has much more challenges than does Texas for instance. 

So, keep watch of the weekly sales numbers here. As of right now, nationally, home sales are ticking higher and should come in showing growth over 2024 in the coming weeks. 

Inventory

On the supply side, there are now 668,000 single family homes unsold on the market. That’s a substantial, nearly 2% climb for the week and is now 30% greater than last year at this time. Inventory is building faster than I expected at the start of the year. There are more sellers, and even though home sales are starting to pick up, the seller volume is moving a little bit faster. This was a gain of nearly 13,000 single family homes on the market. That’s a big week - 2% gain for the second week in a row. 

Inventory is growing faster than it was last year at this time. In general for the year we’ve expected that inventory will keep growing, that’s not a surprise, but it grew pretty quickly last year, so I expected not as steep a slope in 2025. But so far, the slope looks to be steepening. 

In this chart, each line is the year’s curve of available inventory at any given moment. The purple line for 2025 is marching higher. If you’ve been paying attention here, you’ll know that our forecast model has 2025 ending with just about as many homes unsold on the market as we ended 2019. I’ve described that as finally an end to the crisis inventory shortage we’ve been in for five full years. 

And, each week where inventory growth exceeds expectations means the end of year projections inch upward too. I’ve highlighted 2024 and 2019 here so you can see how the year’s inventory growth should end up. The latest HousingWire inventory forecast model for the full year says inventory will grow by 20% by year end. That forecast has been adjusting higher most weeks so far this spring. 

New Listings

Why is inventory rising when sales are rising? Well, we finally have some home sellers who are ready to move. Americans have been sitting on the sidelines with their ultra cheap mortgages for years now, delaying a move, delaying listing their house for sale. And that’s finally starting to change. We can track home seller sentiment changing in the weekly new listings data. 

This week there were 70,000 new single family listings unsold that hit the market. That’s up 2.2% for the week and is 15.5% more than last year at this time. There were 14,000 new listings immediately sold, already in contract, so in total there were nearly 9% more sellers than the same week a year ago.  

9% more sellers and 2% more sales. Sales are inching up and supply is coming faster. 

In our weekly new listings chart you can see the purple line is substantially above the blue line of 2024. It’s climbing each week. 2.2% more new listings than a week ago. It’s totally normal for new listings to climb each week in the spring. The market is underway. But the real trend for 2025 is how the weekly volume of home sellers is finally approaching the gray lines at the top and separating from the gray lines at the bottom of the chart. 

The lines at the bottom are the last five years with Americans holding on to their ultra low mortgage rates. The “lock-in” effect. The gray lines at the top are the years 2015-2020 when we used to have 80, 90, 100 thousand new listings in a given week. We’re not quite to those old normal levels but by the end of June we should expect to be there. 

Where are the sellers coming from? I suspect two channels of motivation for homesellers this spring. The first is that they’ve been sitting on the sidelines for three full years. It’s time to finally move. The second is what I called perhaps “bad economy sellers”. These are folks that are perhaps sensing economic downturn and want to get out before it gets worse. It’s probably very early in the cycle to be identifying these sellers. But we haven’t had a notable economic downturn in this country in 15 years, so the prospect of unemployment or lower income is only anecdotally starting to creep into home seller decision making. 

I don’t know whether recession is coming. It could still be a long way off. But I think the key takeaway for potential homesellers is that if you’re thinking along these lines, you should know that your competition is increasing this year. I don’t see signs of the market getting easier for sellers in 2025. So that is something to be aware of when you’re making home selling decisions this year.

Home Prices

And related to that message, home prices are barely positive vs. last year at this time.  The median price of the week’s pending home sales came in just under $394,000. That is just 1% above last year at this time. So, nationally, home prices are essentially unchanged vs last year.  In fact there are five states where home prices are actually below last year. That’s Texas, Georgia, South Carolina, Washington and Montana. There are 4-5 more states including Colorado, Florida, and Arizona which I will not be surprised to see negative in annual home price change in the next few months. 

To be sure there are still plenty of markets with very tight inventory and enough demand that home prices are rising. New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, much of the midwest. So overall for the country, home prices are flat for the year. Just barely positive. 

In the HousingWire / Altos data we track a bunch of home price measures. The median ask price for all the active market listings is only 20 basis points higher than last year. There are no signals for any notable home price appreciation in 2025. 

In this chart we have the median price of the week’s pending home sales. The purple line is climbing for the spring but is barely above last year. Unless mortgage rates jump again back over 7%, I don’t see a catalyst for significant price decline like we had in that light green line from 2022. But as supply continues to grow the price comparisons with last year become more difficult, especially in the fourth quarter. There are plenty of scenarios visible now where home prices nationally decline for the calendar year 2025. 

Price Reductions

And finally the leading indicators for future sales prices. The percent of homes on the market with price reductions ticked up again this week to 34.3%. That’s 40 basis points more than a week ago. It’s not a fast change. This spring is not a deteriorating market like 2022. I’ve highlighted the price reductions curve from 2022 here today in green. At the time there was a dramatic slowing of the housing market and it led to rapid home price declines. Those were short lived as the economy still had a lot of cash to support buyers in 2023. 

This year is different. There are more price reductions now than any time in many years. Price reductions are increasing which indicates that even as home sales start improving, there is nothing in the data that says that home prices will climb also. In fact we could be looking at a year 2025 when we say home sales climb over last year but home prices fall for the first time since 2010. 

We haven’t seen dramatic changes in the price reductions curve lately. This signal can change fast when market conditions change fast. For example when mortgage rates spike. But we’ve been in a more slowly moving market lately. I expect those recent patterns of slightly improving sales and flat home prices to continue as a result for the next few months. 

If you need to communicate about this market with your buyers and sellers, you should join us at Altos Research.

Go to AltosResearch.com and book time with our team to learn more.

You can also run a free Altos real estate market report for any zip code in the U.S. and receive an update on that area in your inbox every week.

And, if you want to learn how to read and interpret all the stats in the report, I encourage you to download our free eBook: "How to Use Market Data to Build Your Real Estate Business."

See you next week!