What COVID-19 has meant for home sales & prices

Betty Liu, Executive Vice Chairman for NYSE Group, explains:

How has the housing market reacted to the COVID-19 pandemic?

So, as you can well imagine, when stay-at-home orders are put in place, the housing market just dried up. Sales fell dramatically. Existing home sales in the month of April dropped nearly 18%. However, home prices actually continue to still rise. The median price for an existing home in the United States was $286,000. That was a rise of 7.4% from April of 2019.

Why haven't we seen home prices drop due to all this economic uncertainty?

So, as I mentioned, demand fell sharply for houses, existing houses in the United States during this COVID pandemic. And you don't need an economics degree to know that when demand falls, that means prices drop as well. But that didn't happen this time around. And the reason is because supply also fell as well. So, that basically left the supply-demand relationship unchanged.