Pending Home Sales Rise Before Christmas

Pending home sales appear to be rising from a new market bottom as we head into Christmas week 2010. This is very good news, as we cannot expect future home sales to rise if new sales contracts are on the decline.

We measure these new sales contracts, which the industry calls "pending home sales," in order to get a picture of the future of closed home sales (typically 2 months into the future). By tracking contracts, these future closings are follow a consistent pattern.

In the real estate graph above, we observe that the past four weeks has seen some growth from what was a plummeting pending home sales report. We hope that this continues and that we can start see this trend rise from what we hope to be the "final" market bottom.