Existing home sales reached a nine-month high with inventory at 1.43 million units

By NAR: “Sales of existing homes rose for the third month in a row due to lower mortgage rates this fall,” said Lawrence Yun, NAR’s chief economist. “However, inventory growth is starting to stagnate.”

My central theme when selling existing homes has always been that the bar is so low that we can trip over it. This means it doesn’t take much to grow sales here, but this tends to happen when mortgage rates drop, and especially when mortgage rates move towards 6%. With that mindset, 2025 sales data seems normal to me. In fact, purchase requisition data recently had its best 20 weeks of the year, and this data is looking 30-90 days.

Below you will find a historical overview of existing home sales going back decades. As high as rates, taxes, prices and insurance are, we haven’t seen a crash in home sales since late 2022, but we’ve built a low sales base to work from.

NAR Inventory in November:

• 1.43 million units: Total housing stock, down 5.9% from October and up 7.5% from November 2024 (1.33 million).
• Supply of unsold inventory with a term of 4.2 months, down from 4.4 months in October and up from 3.8 months in November 2024.

We’ve heard a lot of people talk lately about how housing is worse now than it was in 2008, but I assume these people were just kids at the time. Home prices fell 12% in 2008, which was the biggest national price crash after World War II, and we had huge distressed sellers during that period. Just take a look at the bankruptcy and foreclosure data from back then:

NAR Total active inventory:

• In 2007: 4 million
• Currently: 1.43 million

NAR Months of delivery:

• In 2008: more than 10 months
• Currently: 4.2 months

It’s hard for me to take seriously people who talk about “worse than 2008” when the data above was easy for anyone to read.

NAR Median sales price in November:

• $409,200: Average existing home price for all home types, up 1.2% from a year ago ($404,400)
• This is the 29th consecutive month of year-over-year price increases.

One of the things I got wrong in 2025 was assuming that we would have some negative annualized price data in October and December because the year-over-year comparisons were difficult. Last year house prices rose in the second half of the year, and with higher inventories this year I assumed we would have seen some slightly negative year-over-year numbers by now, but that hasn’t happened. We still have one month to go before 2025.

Conclusion

These existing home sales seem about right to me; The increase in sales from the June low makes sense based on our Housing Market Tracker data and trending mortgage rates. Earlier this year, year-over-year sales numbers were very simple. If the sales data from June to October were only 4 million, we would see growth. Now the comparisons are a little more difficult and we saw a 1% decline year over year. Still, sales are at a nine-month high and have been on an upward trend since hitting a low in June.