Existing Home Sales at 4.9m, 10.9 Month Supply, “Close To A Bottom”

Existing Home Sales for May were in line with expectations, with an annualized rate of 4.9 million units sold, putting the inventory supply at 10.9 months. One-third of these, 1.65 million annualizedwere distressed properties:

According to the Realtors, a full one third of sales are distressed properties. Think about that. Five million home sales expected this year and of those about 1.65 million will be homes that a seller couldn’t afford to keep.

The National Association of Realtors, who produces the report, said that the median price of existing homes dropped 6.3 percent from May last year to $208,600. The NAR reckons that the past year’s nationwide price drop in single-family homes was the first since the 1930s.

One Lehman analyst told Bloomberg that we might be finding a bottom, albeit a long bottom:

“I think we are close to a bottom,” Michelle Meyer, an economist at Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in New York, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “Sales will probably fall another 5 percent or 10 percent before bottoming by the end of the summer. It will be a feeble recovery, we will kind of bounce along the bottom.”