Signed contracts on existing homes rose 0.3 percent in August from July, but the National Association of Realtors’ pending home sales index still ran 4.7 percent below where it stood a year earlier, underscoring how far contract activity has fallen even as the month-to-month trend turned positive. The index tracks contracts, not closed sales, making it a rough preview of what the next round of closing numbers is likely to show. For sellers and buyers with an August contract already signed, including retirees mid-move into a smaller home, the deal is moving forward even as the broader market around it keeps shrinking.
A national index, not a moving calendar: NAR’s index tracks how many contracts got signed, not the property-tax or utility bills a seller keeps paying while a sale closes, and The Senior Property Tax & Home-Cost Relief Kit keeps an application log and renewal calendar for exactly that gap. Track the paperwork gap with the application log →
Contracts signed, not sales closed: what the pending index measures
NAR’s pending home sales index rose 0.3 percent in August from July, the trade group reported, but remained 4.7 percent below its level in August a year earlier. Unlike the existing-home sales figures NAR reports separately, which count closed transactions, the pending index tracks signed contracts, typically weeks ahead of a closing, making it one of the more forward-looking gauges of where the resale market is headed.
NAR’s chief economist, Lawrence Yun, described the broader picture bluntly, saying contract signings today are running roughly 30 percent below where they were in the years leading up to the pandemic, and attributing the gap to elevated mortgage rates weighing on activity even as job growth and income gains continued. The August index’s small monthly gain does not reverse that longer decline; it only interrupts it for one month.
August’s pending index arrives alongside NAR’s existing-home sales report for the same month, which showed closed sales running at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 3.98 million, down 2.0 percent from July, and total inventory reaching 4.9 months of supply, the highest level in over ten years. Read together, the two reports describe a market where contract activity ticked up slightly even as completed sales slowed and unsold inventory kept building.
The West’s steeper year-over-year pullback
Regional contract activity moved in different directions in August. The West posted the strongest monthly gain, up 3.0 percent from July, but also the steepest annual decline of any region, down 6.7 percent from a year earlier, according to NAR. The South rose 2.3 percent for the month and was down a smaller 3.8 percent year over year, while the Northeast fell 4.2 percent monthly and 3.9 percent annually, and the Midwest fell 1.6 percent monthly and 4.9 percent annually.
The West’s regional pattern, a monthly bounce alongside the sharpest yearly drop, matters for a market that includes some of the country’s most popular retirement relocation states. A steeper year-over-year decline in contract signings there means fewer of the moves, downsizing sales, relocations to a lower-cost state, or purchases of retirement homes, that pending contracts typically represent are being signed today than were a year ago, even with August’s small monthly improvement.
Nationally, the median existing-home price NAR reported for August was $429,100, up 1.6 percent from a year earlier, a gain that held even as pending contract activity in three of the four regions declined year over year. Rising prices alongside falling contract volume is consistent with a market where the buyers still able to sign contracts are doing so despite cost pressure, not because it has eased.
Richmond’s double-digit gain against a national retreat
Against a national index down 4.7 percent from a year earlier, a handful of metro areas moved in the opposite direction. Richmond, Virginia posted the largest year-over-year gain in contract signings among the metro areas NAR tracked, up 11.3 percent, followed by San Antonio, Texas at 6.6 percent and Memphis, Tennessee at 6.4 percent.
Those metro-level gains sit alongside a national figure still running well below where it stood a year ago, illustrating how uneven the pending sales picture is beneath the single national number NAR headlines each month. A seller or buyer in Richmond experienced a materially different market in August than one in a region posting a decline, even though both are captured in the same 4.7 percent year-over-year national figure.
The 30-year fixed mortgage rate NAR cited for August, 6.67 percent, applies the same way to a buyer signing a contract in Richmond as one in a region posting a decline, meaning financing costs alone do not explain why some metro areas are seeing double-digit contract growth while the national figure keeps falling. Local job growth, price levels and migration patterns, none of which NAR’s national index isolates, are left to explain the difference.
A signed contract that has not yet closed still carries ongoing costs for whichever side is selling: property taxes, insurance premiums and utility bills continue to accrue on a listed home right up until the closing table, a stretch that can run six to eight weeks past the August contract date NAR’s index counts. That gap matters most for an owner who has already signed to sell a longtime home and move into something smaller, since the carrying costs on the old address do not stop just because a buyer has been found.
NAR’s own framing, contract signings roughly 30 percent below pre-pandemic norms even after a positive August, leaves open whether the 0.3 percent monthly gain marks a turning point or a single data point inside a longer decline. For the moves already under contract, including whatever share belong to retirees selling a longtime home or buying a smaller one, August’s numbers say only that the deal count ticked up for one month, not that the broader pullback Yun described has ended.
A leading indicator with no closing-cost line
NAR’s pending index previews closings still weeks away, but it does not describe what a seller mid-contract keeps paying, in property taxes, insurance or upkeep, while a deal signed in August works its way to a closing table in the fall.
The Senior Property Tax & Home-Cost Relief Kit keeps an application log and renewal calendar and lists the 5 kinds of property-tax relief available while a sale is pending.
Track the application log and renewal calendar inside The Senior Property Tax & Home-Cost Relief Kit.
This article was researched and drafted with the assistance of AI and reviewed by The Money Overview editorial team.
