Existing home sales see sixth-straight month of declines

Yahoo Finance Live anchors Julie Hyman and Brian Sozzi look at the latest housing data showing that home sales declined for the sixth month in a row.

Video transcript

BRIAN SOZZI: Now, Julie, we have some breaking news here or out very shortly on existing home sales.

JULIE HYMAN: Oh, we got them. We got--

BRIAN SOZZI: Oh, yeah.

JULIE HYMAN: --home sales, and we see a sixth straight month of declines for those existing home sales, coming in with a 5.9% drop to an annual pace of 4.81 million. That's a little bit worse than estimated here. And it just continues to reflect the weakening fundamentals for the housing market. So we saw that drop in July, which is to the weakest level since May of 2020.

And again, it's a little bit worse than estimated here, so economists are sort of expecting at this point that we are seeing weakness in the housing market. It's tracking with rates. It has to do with, as we've seen, rising mortgage rates and just a cooling housing market overall. So not necessarily shocking here to see this number. But nonetheless, it's not encouraging when we're looking at the overall economic data.

BRIAN SOZZI: Yeah, tough to get a read. I hear this data. I get it. We saw shares of Rocket Companies tick down just a little bit after this. Of course, they're one of the main players in the mortgage market. But look, this week, we heard from Home Depot and Lowe's. On one hand, they said seasonal category was weak in the second quarter, but they had a lot of other strength, like in the pro-business. So despite this weakness in home sales, activity hasn't completely dried up. This is not housing crisis stuff. It's just a blow-off top.

JULIE HYMAN: It feels like that, yes. And you can also argue that a lot of the activity that we had in the past few years was a bit of a catch-up effect maybe. Some of it was created by the pandemic, right? People making those moves, but some of it also was sort of areas that had not seen housing price appreciation in a long time of any substance sort of then accelerating really rapidly. So we'll see what happens with prices, too, which we have seen come off a little bit, but there are still definitely some areas that are hot.