About the Data
Three federal series, one continuous record.
The National Association of Realtors' Existing Home Sales report is the definitive measure of the resale residential market. Published monthly, the series counts closed transactions on previously-owned single-family homes, townhomes, condominiums, and co-ops reported through local MLS boards. The NAR first compiled a national existing-home-sales figure in 1968, making this the shorter of the two major sales series — but it covers the far larger segment of the market, since new construction typically represents only 10–15% of total transactions in any given year.
The series captures what is arguably the most important economic signal in the U.S. housing market: the velocity of the existing stock changing hands. When existing sales are high, it signals confidence, equity mobility, and a functioning market for trade-up and trade-down transactions. When existing sales are suppressed — as in 2023–2024 — it signals lock-in effects, reduced household formation, and constrained labor mobility, since workers cannot follow job opportunities that require moving to a higher-cost market without absorbing a higher mortgage rate.
Existing homes account for approximately 85–90% of all U.S. residential transactions in a typical year. The remaining 10–15% is new construction. This means that mortgage rate shocks affect the existing market far more severely than the new-construction market, because existing sellers can simply withdraw inventory rather than accept a lower price, while builders must keep selling (or stop building entirely). The 2022–2024 "rate lock-in" episode illustrated this vividly: owners who refinanced at 2.96% in 2021 faced a payment increase of 60–80% if they traded into a 7% market, so they didn't. Existing sales fell from 6.12M in 2021 to 4.06M in 2024 — the lowest reading since 1995 — while new-home sales declined only modestly.
The Almanac uses NAR's annual figures as published in the Existing Home Sales historical dataset, revised to reflect benchmark methodology updates. Median price data from NAR captures the midpoint of closed-transaction prices, not list prices or appraisals, and reflects only homes that actually transacted — introducing a selection bias toward marketable properties and away from distressed or condition-impaired inventory.