Existing home sales declined 5.1% in January to the lowest level since July 2012, the National Association of Realtors said Feb. 21.
Sales fell to an annual rate of 4.62 million. The January level was lower than economists’ median forecast of 4.67 million, Bloomberg News reported.
“It’s hard to separate the weather effect from the fundamentals, but housing is still reasonably healthy here in recovery mode,” Joshua Shapiro an economist at Maria Fiorini Ramirez Inc., told Bloomberg. “Maybe some of the strength we saw in the latter part of last year was a little overdone and there may have been a bit of a correction anyway, and weather exacerbated that.”
Sales declined 7.3% in the West and 7.1% in the Midwest. Compared with a year earlier, purchases dropped 5.1% in January, Bloomberg reported.