Friday, January 24, 2014

The Housing Market Firms Up

Previously owned home sales finished 2013 at their highest level in six years, with more than 5 million such houses changing hands. That's a 9 percent increase over 2012, and the highest the raw figure has been since 2006, when the housing bubble was in the midst of bursting.

That's the good news. The bad news is that the pace of existing home sales has actually cooled in recent months. Even with seasonal adjustments, housing sales were strongest last year in July and August. By December, they were down to an annual pace of 4.87 million a year.

Prices of existing homes continued to rise in 2013 as well. By December, the median existing-home price in America was $198,000, which is up 9.9 percent from a year earlier.

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