Chicago’s NAR says US pending home sales dip in Nov.; mortgages drop at year-end



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Chicago’s NAR says US pending home sales dip in Nov.; mortgages drop at year-end

On Wednesday, National Association of Realtors (NAR), the century-old Chicago, Illinois-based real estate trade body for those who work in American property industry having had more than 1.4 million members, had issued a statement saying that US pending home sales had tumbled unprecedently last month as a steep lag in availability of previously owned homes in the US coupled with a price-surge had scrambled activities.

On top of that, the Chicago-based real estate trade association also had raised an alarming bell over a flare-up in pandemic cases in the United States as a rapidly spreading Omicron variant seemed to be posing a greater risk to US homebuilding market over Q1, 2022 even as the newly identified pandemic variant would unlikely to cause hospitalization except patients with underlying risk factors according to recent studies.

NAR says US pending home sales drop in Nov.; Mortgage rates decline

According to NAR, the American real-estate trade association’s Pending Home Sales Index which is based on signed contracts, had tumbled 2.2 per cent to 122.4 last month, while sales appeared to have indented in all four regions across the United States.

Besides, over past twelve months through November, US pending home sales declined 2.7 per cent on a year-on-year basis, as a homebuyers’ race towards suburbs and countryside last year during early days of the pandemic had led to an unfathomable scale of price-surge with US inflation hovering at 2-1/2-fold of the US Federal Reserve’s target range of 2.0 per cent.

Meanwhile, addressing to a lack in house supply, an NAR chief economist Lawrence Yun said, "There was less pending home sales action this time around, which I would ascribe to low housing supply, but also to buyers being hesitant about home prices.

While I expect neither a price reduction, nor another year of record-pace price gains, the market will see more inventory in 2022 and that will help some consumers with affordability”. On long-term home loans front, US mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said that an average of long-term fixed-rate mortgages dipped last week, as 30-year fixed-rate mortgages fell to 3.05 per cent and 15-year fixed-rate mortgages dropped 0.7 percentage points to 2.3 per cent.