By Logan Mohtashami | HousingWire
Today the National Association of Realtors reported existing home sales for the month of December were at 6,760,000, a beat of estimates. This also closed the books on 2020’s housing market as we finished out the year at 5,640,000 total existing-home sales — a 5.6% increase from the same month in 2019.
Instead of thinking of the end of 2020 and going into 2021 as a hot sales market, this increase over December 2019 sales may be more appropriately interpreted as an end-of-the-year bump due to “make-up sales” for sales missed during the COVID shutdown in the spring of 2020.
The COVID crisis of 2020 was responsible for a lot of abnormal metrics in the housing market. Data lines that are typically very sticky, i.e. take months to move significantly in either direction, took waterfall dives, and then made parabolic recoveries — the existing home sales numbers are an extreme case of this.
