Existing-home sales dropped 2% in August from July. The seasonally adjusted annual rate came to 3.98 million units, the National Association of Realtors said on Thursday, September 10, 2026, and it was the slowest pace in more than a year. The Associated Press, in a story carried by the Los Angeles Times, said it was also the third monthly decline in a row. Compared with August 2025, sales were down 1.2%.
Economists polled by FactSet had expected something close to 4 million. The result landed just under it.
Rates are the brake
NAR chief economist Lawrence Yun did not sound surprised. “It’s not a surprise home sales and mortgage rates move in the opposite direction and we have seen mortgage rates rising, rising, rising from February,” he said.
The AP traced the climb to the war between the U.S. and Iran, which began in late February. Fears of higher inflation as oil surged pushed up the long-term bond yields lenders use to price mortgages. This week the average 30-year rate reached 6.76%, the highest in more than 14 months, after a brief dip below 6% before the fighting. Yun said it could soon reach 7%, since mortgage rates tend to follow the 10-year Treasury yield. That yield stood at 4.92% on Thursday morning, a level not seen since late 2023.
Many of August’s closings were probably signed in June and July, when the 30-year rate ran between 6.43% and 6.66%.
Prices still rising, stock edging up
Prices did not follow sales down. The U.S. median sales price rose 1.6% from a year earlier to $429,100, the highest ever for an August in records going back to 1999, NAR said. Annual price gains have now lasted 38 months in a row. In the Northeast, where listings are scarce, prices rose 4.3%.
Slower sales mean unsold homes sit longer. NAR counted 1.62 million homes for sale at the end of August, up 3.2% from July and 5.9% from a year earlier. That works out to a 4.9-month supply at the current pace, the highest in over 10 years. A 4- to 6-month supply is traditionally seen as balanced. Still, it falls short of the roughly 2 million listings that were typical before the pandemic.
Regionally, sales fell from July in the Northeast, Midwest and South and held flat in the West. First-time buyers made up 30% of purchases, against 29% in July and 28% a year earlier. Historically they account for closer to 40%.
The market has been stuck since 2022, when mortgage rates started rising from pandemic lows. Sales have hovered near a 4-million pace since 2023, well below the historic norm of closer to 5.2 million. The last reading under 4 million was June 2025. Even so, sales through the first eight months of 2026 ran 1.6% above the same stretch of 2025.
Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, put the mood bluntly: “It’s not a good time to sell your home.” Americans, she said, “are hitting the pause button on homebuying.”
