By Sho Chandra | Bloomberg
A limited number of homes for sale and higher selling prices are making for one painstaking U.S. housing recovery.
Contract closings on previously owned properties unexpectedly dropped 3.3 percent to a 5.04 million annualized rate in April after a 5.21 million pace that was the strongest in almost two years, figures from the National Association of Realtors showed Thursday in Washington. Prices jumped the most since the start of 2014 as the inventory of houses on the market declined from the same time last year.
“Confidence in the housing market is still a little bit tentative,” said Tom Simons, a money market economist at Jefferies LLC in New York, whose projection for 5.1 million sales was among the closest in the Bloomberg survey. “We’ll start to see some more progress, but there are some roadblocks in the way for housing that won’t allow it to explode to the upside.”
