U.S. Existing-Home Sales Stuck at Four-Year Low as Turnover Hits Historic Floor
Existing-home sales have remained at historically low levels for four straight years, constrained by high mortgage rates and locked-in homeowners, while new-home sales hold closer to pre-pandemic norms.
U.S. existing-home sales have now spent four consecutive years at historically low levels, according to the latest September reading, marking an unusually prolonged slump in resale turnover that has persisted across both resilient and softening regional markets. The stagnation follows the pandemic-era demand surge, which gave way to sharply higher mortgage rates and elevated switching costs that have kept many homeowners from listing their properties.
While monthly headlines often report that existing-home sales are rising or falling based on the seasonally adjusted annualized rate published by the National Association of Realtors, the underlying picture is far flatter. Unadjusted monthly figures, adjusted for normal seasonal patterns, show that resale activity has barely moved. Since mid-2022, transactions have largely bounced along what analysts describe as the «Ds of Housing» floor — sales that occur only out of necessity, driven by life events such as death, divorce, disability, and other circumstances that force households to move.
A resale turnover index that adjusts for population change, using owner-occupied households to allow for comparisons across decades, shows the market has now sat in the bottom 25th percentile for four straight years — the threshold for what is considered historically low. The pattern holds in relatively resilient markets in parts of the Northeast and Midwest as well as in softer Sun Belt markets that have experienced a more pronounced cyclical cooling.
New-home sales present a different picture. While they remain below their pandemic housing boom peaks, they are still roughly on par with pre-pandemic levels seen in 2018 and 2019. That resilience has come at a cost to builders, particularly in Sun Belt markets such as Florida and Texas, where companies have made deeper cuts to net effective home prices. They have used tools including mortgage rate buydowns, cash back at closing, and outright price reductions over the past few years, all at the expense of their margins.
In local markets where active inventory has spiked and existing-home sales are pressing below the necessity-driven floor, some sellers will need to adjust their expectations if they want to close a deal. Early signs of that adjustment are already appearing in pockets of the Pacific Northwest, Texas, Florida, and Colorado as the market heads into the seasonally soft window.
The four-year stretch underscores how elevated borrowing costs and the reluctance of homeowners with low-rate mortgages to move have reshaped the U.S. housing landscape. For buyers, the limited supply of resale homes has kept competition for available properties relatively tight in many areas, even as overall transaction volumes remain depressed. For sellers, the calculus is increasingly local: in markets where inventory has built up, pricing and concessions may be necessary to attract buyers, while in supply-constrained areas, the standoff continues.
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