Home sales hit slowest pace in 5 years by Delia Cruceru

Lawrence Yun, chief executive at NAR released a press release saying that July home sales were down 9% from July 2006. "Home sales probably would be raising in the absence of the mortgage liquidity issues of the past two months," Yun said. This is the worst decay in 16 years of housing, and analyst think there's many to come. According to the National Association of Realtors the sales of existing homes dipped by 0.2 percent in July, compared to June, to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.75 million units. Ethan S. Harris, chief economist at Lehman Brothers Holdings in New York said "We are very likely to see home sales continue to drop. There's a big imbalance between supply and demand, with lots of people who want to sell and lots of hesitant buyers." The number of unsold homes now rose to by 5.1 percent to a record level of 4.59 million homes, analyst saying that it would take 9.2 months to exhaust the number of single-family homes on the market, and 11.9 months to exhaust the level of condominiums on the market. "We are literally swimming in an ocean of homes for sale," said Mike Larson, a real estate analyst with Weiss Research Inc. "Until we work through this extremely large inventory glut, we're not going to see any momentum in home prices."

related story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070827/ap_on_bi_go_ec_fi/economy;_ylt=AnJkI1fFJaC_cpvPIQ_ZHl2s0NUE

by Delia Cruceru for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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