ShareTaking a closer look at Existing Home Sales price data reveals an interesting trend going on in the market...
- As shown in the chart below, while sales in the lower home-price tiers are falling, sales at the upper end are rising, quite swiftly at the highest end.
- One impact of the fact that home sales are rising at the high end but falling at the low end is that the mix of homes may be changing. In addition to fewer distressed properties, homes selling now may have more bedrooms, square footage, and other valuable amenities than homes that were sold last year.
- This shift in the mix of homes selling has the effect of pushing up the price of the median home sold, which is simply the price of the home where 50 percent of all homes sold were priced above and 50 percent were priced below that sales price.
- In spite of this drawback in the median home sales price, it has advantages of being able to be produced quickly and being a remarkably good leading indicator for other price measures that are less susceptible to the mix of homes issue.
