Existing home sales in May will increase by 5.8% from the same month last year, the real estate marketplace Auction.com predicts.
The company also expects existing home sales to rise 2.9% from April.
"Heading into the summer buying season, we're expecting to see healthy increases in home sales activity — though those increases will likely occur at a more modest pace," Auction.com executive vice president Rick Sharga said in a release.
The site's optimism contrasts with National Association of Realtors figures for April that showed a 3.3% decrease from March. Both Auction.com and NAR expected better figures, though April's numbers were still 6.1% higher than the same month the year before.
"It's important to keep blips like the one we saw in March in context. We're in an unusually volatile period in the housing market, with almost unprecedented swings in sales volumes from month to month," Sharga said in the release. The bottom line is that in a truly healthy housing market, we'd already be on pace for 6 million existing home sales, but at this rate, I expect that the market will stay in the 5 million range for at least the remainder of the year."
