US Home Sales Slide as Pending Listings Drop 17% in October
Zillow's October report shows existing home sales fell nearly 9% annually, while newly pending listings posted their steepest year-over-year decline since 2023.
Existing home sales retreated sharply in October, with Zillow's preliminary data showing a year-over-year decline of 8.7%, according to the company's October Market Report released this week. The pullback signals continued strain in a housing market wrestling with elevated mortgage rates and constrained inventory.
Newly pending listings — a forward-looking metric that typically foreshadows the following month's closed transactions — dropped 16.8% compared with the same period a year ago. That represents the largest such annual decline since 2023, underscoring how quickly buyer momentum has eroded heading into the traditionally slower winter season.
Read more AI Growth Could Widen Global Wealth Gap by $360 Billion, Study Finds →
The back-to-back drops in both completed and pending sales suggest the market faces compounding headwinds. When pending activity falls at this pace, closed-sale figures in subsequent months are likely to reflect continued softness, analysts note, though Zillow's report itself does not project forward estimates beyond the data presented.
The October figures arrive as affordability remains a central obstacle for prospective buyers. Even with modest price adjustments in some regions, the combination of still-elevated home prices and borrowing costs continues to sideline a significant share of the buyer pool, keeping transaction volume well below pandemic-era peaks.
Continue reading at Economic News, Trends, Analysis.
