Existing home sales show strength of demographics

The National Association of Realtors reported existing home sales for the month of June were under their estimates slightly. The seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.86 million achieved in June was a bit better than my expectations, ending four months of declines.

If existing home sales were getting noticeably weaker, we would expect the sales trend to be around 5.3 million, which would be back to 2019 levels. But that is not what is happening. Every single existing home sales print this year indicated an annual rate of sales higher than the total existing-home sales in 2020.

As I anticipated, Americans are buying more homes with mortgages in the years 2020-2021 than any single year from 2008-2019. The years 2022-2023 will be the sweet spot years because ages 30 to 31 will make up the biggest age group in history.

Almost four months ago, I wrote that based on the year-over-year growth in purchase applications, the housing market should have a few existing home sales prints under 5,840,000. I wrote:

“The rule of thumb I am using for 2021 is that existing home sales if they’re doing good, should be trending between 5,840,000-6,200,000. This, to me, would be considered a good year for housing. This also means that we should have some prints above 6,200,000 like we have had already and below 5,840,000, which hasn’t happened yet. We ended 2020 with 5,640,000 existing home sales, which was only roughly 130,000 more than 2017 levels.”