Pending home sales data crushes housing bears

Today’s pending home sales came in at a big beat of estimates, running at 8.1% for this report. More importantly, this data line looks just right. One of my main goals for sharing housing sales data in 2021 is to give people a sales trend range to work off this year to know if home sales are doing well.

Last year we had an abnormal burst of housing demand that was just make-up demand from the COVID-19 pause in the second half of 2020. This led to home sales data surging to levels that were not sustainable and were going to moderate.

My concern was that people would overreact to that sales moderation and not know how to make COVID-19 adjustments to data. As we all know, the housing sector has extremely well-developed yet untalented Americans calling for a housing crash during the years 2012-2021. My job has always been to show you why this wasn’t the case. As someone who has been talking about the years 2020-2024 having the best housing demographics ever recorded in history, a home sales crash in demand wasn’t in the works in 2020 or 2021.