Sales of existing homes in the United States have dipped in February, driven by rising home prices and severe winter weather, the National Association of Realtors says.
Sales of used homes fell 0.4 per cent to an annual pace of 4.60 million February, matching analyst expectations and down from a rate of 4.62 million in January. The February sales pace was the lowest since July 2012, NAR said.
Sales of single-family homes, the largest part of the market, edged down 0.2 per cent. Sales of condominiums and co-ops dropped 1.8 per cent.
The median price for all used housing types was $189,000, up slightly from January. The median price gained 9.1 per cent from February 2013.
NAR said on Thursday that conditions in February were roughly the same as in January, but that with an expected pickup in job creation, home sales should trend up modestly over the course of the year.
"We had ongoing unusual weather disruptions across much of the country last month, with the continuing frictions of constrained inventory, restrictive mortgage lending standards and housing affordability less favourable than a year ago," Lawrence Yun, NAR chief economist, said in a statement.
But Ian Shepherdson of Pantheon Macroeconomics noted that the underlying trend in existing-home sales was clearly downward long before the bad weather started.
"It seems reasonable to think that at least some of the drop in the past three months reflects the severe winter and will reverse. Whether that will be enough to generate an increase in activity is another question, though, given that mortgage demand continues to fall," he said.