Home sales contracts signed in June unexpectedly rose, boosting an index of pending sales to the highest level since October, though it was well below the year-ago level, a real estate trade group said on Thursday.
The National Association of Realtors said its Pending Home Sales Index, based on contracts signed in June, was up 5.3 [...]

Existing home sales are expected to begin stabilizing late this year, but the housing market is still years away from recovering, analysts said Monday.
Analysts with Stifel, Nicolaus & Co. said they expect the pace of existing home sales to flatten out in the 4.7 million to 5.1 million range for the next 18 months. But [...]

Home prices in 20 U.S. metropolitan areas fell at a faster pace in May, indicating the three-year housing slump has not stabilized, a private survey showed Tuesday.
The S&P/Case-Shiller home-price index dropped 15.8 percent from a year earlier, the biggest decline since records began in 2001, after decreasing 15.2 percent in April. The gauge has fallen [...]

Home sales continued their slide in June, making the first half of 2008 the slowest housing market in more than 15 years, a Boston real estate publishing firm said today in its monthly housing report.
There were 4,663 sales of single-family homes last month, about a 15 percent decline from the number of sales transactions closed [...]

Sales of existing homes slowed more than expected in June while inventory increased, according to an industry trade group reading of the sluggish housing market released Thursday.
The National Association of Realtors reported that sales by homeowners dipped in June to an annual pace of 4.86 million, down 2.6% from a pace of 4.99 million in [...]

The real estate market in Chester County had mixed results in the first half of 2008.
Median home prices remained steady at $310,000, the highest in the five-county Philadelphia area and the same as its mid-mark in 2007.
Meanwhile, far fewer homes sold in the county during the period compared to the first half of 2007, and [...]

Homeowners are resorting to increasingly aggressive price cuts in an effort to sell their properties, with asking prices across England and Wales an average 4,000 less than they were a year ago as a new realism sets in across the housing market.
The average price is now 235,219, 2% less than last July, according to the [...]

The Bush administration’s pledge to rescue ailing housing finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac raises anew questions about just when the nation’s dismal housing market will hit bottom.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson have suggested over the past year that an end is in sight. But with each prediction, things [...]

The real estate market in the Beaver County region is far from stellar, but things here could be worse as the nation struggles with the worst housing slump since the Great Depression.
While home sales are down, prices are up in Beaver and western Allegheny counties for the first half of the year over the same [...]

A total of 921 single-family homes were sold last month in San Joaquin,CA, up from 859 in May, according to figures from the latest Coldwell Banker Grupe-TrendGraphix monthly sales report, based on Multiple Listing Service data.
That is the highest monthly tally of closed escrow sales in the county back through January 2002, the oldest data [...]