- Gino Blefari, Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices
Residential home sales plunged in February despite the promising start of the year. Contrary to experts' forecasts, total existing home sales slipped 3.7% over the month of February. Nevertheless, last month's results were still 5.4% higher than a year ago. According to the National Association of Realtors, the drop was mainly attributable to shortage of homes in the affordable price range. In February, the median house price soared 7.7%, which tags the 60th consecutive monthly increase. Realtors cannot satisfy the demand because more prosperous buyers quickly acquire newly listed houses and, thus, leave minimal choices to the remaining customers. Consequently, housing inventories went up 4.2% but still remained lower than a year ago. The other data revealed that on the week ended March 17, US crude oil inventories surged 5.0M barrels, which significantly exceeds experts' forecasts. Moreover, the week highlighted the tenth increase in the last eleven weeks and presented a new record of 533.1M barrels.
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