Higher Mortgage Rates Keep April Existing Home Sales Nearly Flat

An affordability squeeze kept April home sales almost motionless even as spring should have opened the busiest buying window of the year. On a median-priced existing home of $417,700, even a modest mortgage-rate bump can add more than $100 a month to principal and interest, enough to knock middle-income buyers out of the market; sales rose just 0.2% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.02 million and were unchanged from a year earlier.

The National Association of Realtors’ reading fell far short of expectations. Housing analysts had looked for a gain of more than 3%, and March sales were revised down 3.6%, underscoring how weak the market was heading into the new season. Because the sales report tracks closings, April’s numbers largely reflected contracts signed in late February and March, before mortgage rates ended March in the high-5% range and then jumped sharply in April after the start of the U.S.-Israel war with Iran.

Inventory improved but remained too tight to give buyers much leverage. Listings rose 5.8% from March and 1.4% from a year earlier, bringing supply to 4.4 months, still well below the roughly six-month level that is generally considered balanced. Lawrence Yun, the association’s chief economist, said the market still needed about 30% more inventory to normalize. Even with buyers taking longer to decide, multiple offers were still appearing in some places.

Prices kept climbing despite the soft sales pace. The median existing-home price in April reached $417,700, up 0.9% from a year earlier and the highest April price in National Association of Realtors records. Homes sat on the market for an average of 32 days, up from 29 days a year earlier, and first-time buyers accounted for 33% of sales.

The outlook for the rest of the year hinged on whether rates could ease enough to restore purchasing power. Yun and the National Association of Realtors have projected existing-home sales will rise around 14% in 2026, but the latest rate moves have made that recovery look slower and more uneven, especially in markets where inventory remains too thin to absorb pent-up demand.