Sales of previously occupied U.S. homes remained mired near a 30-year low in April, extending a sluggish spring homebuying season that has failed to lift the market out of its post-pandemic slump.
The National Association of Realtors said Monday that existing home sales crept up 0.2% from March to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.02 million units. That’s essentially flat from both the prior month and from April 2025, and it fell short of the 4.12 million pace economists polled by FactSet had expected. Sales have been stuck near the 4-million mark since 2023 — far from the pre-2022 norm of roughly 5.2 million annual transactions.
“This spring homebuying season, so far all the way through April, we can say we are not predicting any increase compared to one year ago,” Lawrence Yun, NAR’s chief economist, said in a statement accompanying the data.
While buyers continue to face an affordability squeeze, price growth has cooled considerably from the double-digit surges of the early 2020s. The U.S. median existing-home price edged up 0.9% from a year earlier to $417,700, an all-time high for the month of April, NAR said. It was the 34th straight month of annual increases, yet the pace of those gains has moderated as higher mortgage rates dampen demand.
Buyers who closed in April likely locked in rates in February and March, when the average 30-year fixed mortgage dipped as low as 5.98% — its lowest in three and a half years — before climbing back to 6.38%, according to Freddie Mac. The average rate stood at 6.37% last week, and mortgage finance tracker Freddie Mac noted that rate swings have intensified since the conflict with Iran began, with energy-price spikes stoking fears of renewed inflation that could keep borrowing costs elevated.
One bright spot for buyers is a slow but steady rise in available supply. The number of unsold homes on the market reached 1.47 million at the end of April, up 5.8% from March and 1.4% from a year earlier. That’s the most homes for sale in any April since 2019, but it still represents just a 4.4-month supply at the current sales pace — below the five- to six-month inventory level that economists consider a balanced market.
“We really need to see 30% growth in inventory, but we’re not really seeing that,” Yun said.
Properties are taking longer to sell, which has begun to exert some downward pressure on asking prices in many metro areas, especially in the South and Midwest. The typical home spent 32 days on the market in April, up from 29 days a year earlier, NAR said. The national median listing price dipped year-over-year, according to Realtor.com, signaling that sellers in some regions are adjusting expectations after years of rapid appreciation.
Still, the chronic shortage of homes for sale — the legacy of more than a decade of underbuilding after the 2008 financial crisis — continues to prop up prices even in a sales environment that Yun described as historically stagnant. “Affordability remains a major hurdle,” Yun said, noting that while average incomes are now rising faster than home prices, millions of would-be buyers remain locked out of the market.