IRVINE, CA—Auction.com has revised its July Auction.com Real Estate Nowcast downward, projecting that existing home sales for the month of July will fall between seasonally adjusted annual rates of 5.39 and 5.75 million annual sales with a targeted number of 5.57 million – up 1.4% from June.

That is a more modest increase than the nowcast had previously called for. The projected median sales price for July reflected in the company's original nowcast released on July 22 remains unchanged at $239,126.
Online traffic patterns shifted over the latter half of July, leading to the downward revision from Auction.com's original prediction (a range of 5.49 and 5.84 million annual sales with a targeted number of 5.67 million). These patterns are similar to the recent decline in pending home sales reported on July 29 by the National Association of REALTORS. That report included a Pending Home Sales (PHSI) figure of 110.3—a 1.8% month-over-month growth decline for a month of June—noting that competition for existing homes is stiff due to inventory constraints and price increases.
“While we believe that the housing market continues to recover from the most volatile boom and bust cycle we've ever seen, that recovery continues to be uneven, taking an occasional step backwards,” said Auction.com executive vice president Rick Sharga. “One potential cause for concern is that as home prices continue to rise – significantly outpacing wage growth – many markets are becoming too expensive for first time buyers to enter, which effectively causes the whole home buying engine to seize up.”
Sharga also expressed concern regarding the Fed's recent announcement that it is likely to raise interest rates as early as fall, noting, “If mortgage rates rise by as little as a point while home prices continue to go up, the slow but steady housing recovery we've been watching could suddenly take a turn for the worst.”
The Auction.com Real Estate Nowcast combines industry data, proprietary company transactional data and Google search activity to predict market trends as they are occurring – weeks before the findings of other benchmark studies are released. Building upon the groundbreaking work by Google chief economist Hal Varian, Auction.com's nowcast model extends a traditional autoregressive-forecasting model to incorporate contemporaneous information that provides significantly enhanced accuracy.
Auction.com will occasionally update its nowcast as fresh data provides additional signals for current home sales activity. The Auction.com Real Estate Nowcast model has proven highly accurate over the course of 2014 and into 2015.