Existing-Homes Sales Decline 2.4 Percent in June Following Hopeful May

The Spring sales season ends with a thud. Affordability is in the gutter. Existing-home sales have gone nowhere since October 2022. The National Association of Realtors reports Existing-Home Sales Rise 3.2 Percent in May. “The back-and-forth in monthly home sales activity, driven by mild fluctuations in mortgage rates, shows how sensitive home buyers are to affordability conditions,” said NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun. “However, job gains—more than half a million since the beginning of the year—will continue to provide support for the housing market.” “The median home price has reached an all-time high. Even so, affordability is better than a year ago because wage growth is outpacing home price growth,” Yun continued. “However, progress on long-term housing affordability could be hampered if inventory growth continues to stall. Without consistent gains in inventory, home prices can accelerate. It is critical to introduce more supply to the market to widen the opportunity for homeownership.” Existing-Home Sales Month-Over-Month Changes have been essentially trendless for years. Key March 2026 Statistics - Sales Month-Over-Month: 2.4% decrease in existing-home sales month-over-month. - Sales Year-Over-Year: 2.8% increase in existing-home sales year-over-year to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.09 million. - Inventory Units: 1.56 million units: Total housing inventory down 0.6% from May and up 1.3% from June 2025. - Inventory Supply: 4.6-month supply of unsold inventory, up from 4.5 months last month and unchanged from 4.6 months one year ago. - Median existing-home price:$440,600: Median existing-home price for all housing type. - 1.8% increase from one year ago ($432,700)—the 36th consecutive month of year-over-year price increases. - Median Market Time: 28 days median time on market for properties, down from 29 days last month, up from 27 days in June 2025. Existing-Home Sales Year-Over-Year Existing Home Sales Supply The NAR does not seasonally adjust much of its data as evidenced by the above silly looking chart. chart. Seasonally adjusted, supply is no longer rising. May and June supply are below the highs a year ago. That’s the first time since at least 2021. Existing-Home Sales vs Mortgage Rates In contrast to Yun’s statements, there has been no traction in existing home sale with declining mortgage rates. Rates fell from 7.62 percent to 6.05 percent with sales meandering nowhere. Sales have basically gone nowhere even as rates fell from 7.62 percent to 6.05 percent. But rates have risen again. The current Mortgage News Daily rate is 6.68 percent. MND is more accurate than the Freddie Mac data in my chart because it includes points and fees. I use Freddie Mac data because I have a download from the St. Louis Fed. The only conclusion is home prices are still too high, mortgage rates are too high, or both. Affordability Nonsense Here is Lawrence Yun’s comment on affordability from last month. “More Americans are on the move, with home sales rising to the highest level since December. This is great news for the housing market and the economy,” said NAR Chief Economist Dr. Lawrence Yun. “Improving affordability is helping drive this momentum. Even with mortgage rates ticking up compared to earlier in the year, they remain lower than a year ago and are essentially at the long-term historical average. Income gains are also outpacing home price growth by a small margin in most parts of the country.” “The new record-high May home price reflects solid fundamentals for homeowners and ongoing supply constraints,” Yun said. I commented, “So we have record high prices and rising interest rates and Yun yaps about improving affordability.” Yun repeated the nonsense this month on the basis of wage growth. Real wages are declining, median prices are rising, Case-Shiller home prices are at record highs, and mortgage rates are back up to 6.68 percent. Yet, Yun claims affordability is improving. Yun calculates an affordability of 102.3, up from 95.5 a year ago. That’s a 7.12 percent increase in affordability. What a preposterous hoot. Synopsis - Real Income falling - Home prices rising - Mortgage rates rising - Case-Shiller record high prices. - Yun claims affordability is improving Related Posts May 26, 2026: Consumer Credit Stress Is Comparable to the Great Recession Auto delinquencies are at a new record and credit cards are near record high. June 16, 2026: Housing Starts Crash 15.4 Percent on Top of Steep Negative Revision Compared to the unrevised April number, starts decline 19.7 percent. June 25, 2026: New Home Sales Drop Another 7.3 Percent, Builders Struggle with Rising Inventory Sales are down. Inventory is high and rising, pressuring builders. July 5, 2026: Case-Shiller National Home Price Index Hovers Near All-Time Highs Home prices remain in the stratosphere, transactions in the gutter. And Yun hoots about affordability. None of the Chairman nor its technical staff knows how the system works. Even under William McChesney Martin Jr., he thought that “banks actually pick up savings and pass them out the window, that they are intermediaries in the true sense of the word” Dr. John Cochrane: “Nobody really knows how monetary policy works, and certainly not with the complex technocratic expertise that the Fed pretends.” And don’t ask AI, you’ll get 4 different answers for the same question. Lawrence Yun….”There’s never been a better time to buy” His schtick never changes. The FED Crashed The Housing Market When They Drastically Raised Rates – After Lowering Them To Almost ZERO For Around TEN Years To Save The Too BIG To Fail/Jail Corporations & Banksters – Which Caused MASSIVE Inflation.! Yun needs to speak to the housing foreclosure rate (%) is back to 2000 level highs. Even worse than GFC! Going down. And that may take GDPNow into negative territory shortly. But I thought Trump was going to deport all those job-stealing house buying immigrants and renters and blacks would rejoice with amazing housing deals all over the country. What went wrong? Do we need 3 more Trump terms to make that happen? Do worry, Trump, Walrus & GOP will find a way to make things even worse.™ “What went wrong?” Slowly but surely, the Supreme Court is fixing the problem. And in many markets, both rents and home prices *are* coming down. In most other markets, YoY growth rates in prices are slowing. The immigration problem was real in driving up prices. But few are buying….as the post points out. And if Trump gets his rate cuts, housing prices will likely rise up again. Of course, if Trump’s Iran war keeps going, oil will go through the roof and inflation will soar and no one will be able to afford anything. So what went wrong? The Fed bought $2.6 Trillion of MBS during Covid through purchases and reinvestments, driving mortgage rates under 3%. That ridiculous forced distortion of the housing market is why few are buying today. Most sellers are also buyers, and most of the sellers have disappeared in response to the Fed’s MBS debacle. I suppose we can always move into Hoovervilles as inflation continues to crush 95% of the population Go long on cardboard and corrugated tin. Nothing like watching funny Yunny the clown giggle and clap while America walks into the kind of crisis that’ll make 2008 look like a good time. No jobs, no houses, real wages in the gutter, inflation fully out of control, and the entire United States economy is perched on a bubble investors see popping in the next two years. What more can Americans ask for? The best part is that none of the levers available to anyone will work anymore. Does the Fed slash rates and set the inflation on fire? Maybe they hike them and watch as jobs dry up even further. There’s no way to get people out of the houses they bought at bargain rates, and people can’t afford to pay on a house like a bad credit card, so that’s going to need huge intervention to fix. And even if you do have a sweetheart deal on a house, your groceries and gas now eat up most of your budget. Good luck replacing a broken refrigerator. My question to you Mish is what can even be done at this point. I’ve said before and I will say again that I don’t see a recovery for this outside of FDR tier government intervention to break up out of control monopolies (see the entire tech sector), save agriculture from becoming an out of control oligopoly, and reel in K shaped regulation that’s rendered us a corporate socialist dystopia. And that’s something neither party has the chutzpah to do currently. Dont forget power. Electricity is gonna go through the roof between data centers and when the new gas terminal opens up and we can export more to the eu. I mean on one hand electricity is going to be pushed renewable and that’s a good thing. People’s houses should come with solar, not after the fact. On the other hand, data centers are not a sustainable thing. The “demand” for AI is a mixture of circular financing and free lunch handouts to court potential customers. The entire ‘industry’ is bleeding money with no path to making it because none exists. You cannot monopolize an entire technology, especially when it can run on your phone locally for most uses. It is tulips all the way down because people know the stock market is up the creek with a turd for a paddle otherwise. “My question to you Mish is what can even be done at this point.” Well I’m not Mish but my take is what I’ve been saying all along: Got exit strategy? At least you’ve proven yourself to have a functioning brain. You see the issues, you know there’s no real answer except one. Welcome to the great awakening. MPO we constantly hear about this “exit strategy”, but I don’t think I’ve once heard you explain how exactly you plan to “exit” something like this. Do they use clams as currency where you’re going? Do you not see more expats following you for work if this gets bad? I fail to see the rationality if you’re planning for something this bad. There are no guarantees with any strategy or plan, the point is to have something other than sit and whine all day about it. The true exit strategy is to learn skills (hunting, gathering, repairing and maintaining machinery and engines, and know how to build things for example) and live with what you can carry. Anything besides this and you wont see freedom imo. Why because anything less than what I stated above breeds dependency, and that can bring one to slavery, or death in a SHTF moment. A bonus is to plan this with like minded individuals, but even this can backfire and you’ll end up in dependency. If you can’t learn skills stack things to barter (metals, drugs, alcohol, bullets, food, medical supplies are the biggest imo). The problem with stacking is (1) your resources are tied to a location, and (2) eventually others will know what you have and you’ll have to protect it. In a true SHTF moment there is no guarantees of any plan working and as such this is why prepping, honing skills, and even stacking are important because each will give an opportunity to turn the tide to your favor. I used to really like watching those DoomsDay Prepper ‘reality’ shows on TV about 10-15 years ago. People spending an immense amount of time, effort and money to be ready for the Big One – while I watched TV and passively invested my money into basic stock market indices. I wonder how those preppers are doing today? These plans have always been dumb as hell though. None of that stacks up to “guy who is liked by his community” in terms of usefulness. It’s the same logic that’s turned our military from something everyone contributed to into a special forces obsessed short bus. Be liked by your neighbors, be kind, be intelligent. That’s really it. “Be liked by your neighbors, be kind, be intelligent. That’s really it.” In a true SHTF moment you can be in a situation where you thought you were with like minded people and thus with friends but you’ll be surprised how quickly people will turn on each other. Add to this resources running thin, and your with people who have families and it can get ugly fast. Thing is humans who never faced starvation, fear of being hunted (and you will be hunted in a SHTF moment once you excise any freedoms), the immense stress of the unknown, and having to contend with the elements they’re unpredictable. IMO that leaves 99% of the population as unpredictable, and if you’re willing to add that to a SHTF safety net by all means I wish you the best of luck.