Existing home sales show year-over-year growth again

Existing home sales have shown year-over-year growth for two consecutive months, as mortgage rates have remained below 6.64% for the same period. However, let’s remember that the bar is very low for yearly growth. In fact, for many months, I’ve said that the reports coming out from June to October — which will be reported from July to November — will have the lowest year-over-year comps in history, so take the growth with a grain of salt. However, looking forward, purchase applications have just had their best eight weeks of the year and this data line typically doesn’t reflect in the sales data until 30-90 days later. So we can still see some growth in existing home sales as the year progresses.We really need 12-14 weeks of consistently positive weekly purchase application data to be a material event and in the last eight weeks we’ve had seven positive and only one negative, marking eight straight weeks of double-digit year-over-year growth. If we can string out four to six more week of positive purchase apps data, we can see some growth from these low levels. “”“”’’’