Global Economic Weakness Comes Home; Existing Home Sales Tumble – Daily Mortgage Rate Update for August 24th, 2010

The National Association of Realtors reported on existing home sales in July this morning, and the results were dismal. Home sales declined at a year-over-year pace of 27.2%, falling to a pace of 3.83 million units per year. While this information sounds very bad, bear in mind that the figures reported by NAR annualize a single month’s results. The housing sector has been viewed as the destroyer of the economy, and is widely seen as the sector that will lead the economy back to normalcy in the future.