Sluggish start for spring homebuying season as home sales fall in March with mortgage rates rising

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The spring homebuying season is off to a sluggish start as home shoppers contend with elevated mortgage rates and rising prices

LOS ANGELES — The spring homebuying season is off to a sluggish start as home shoppers contend with elevated mortgage rates and rising prices.

Sales of previously occupied U.S. homes fell 4.3% in March from the previous month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.19 million, the National Association of Realtors said Thursday. That's the first monthly decline in sales since December and follows a nearly 10% monthly sales jump in February.

Existing home sales also fell 3.7% compared with March last year. The latest sales still came in slightly higher than the 4.16 million pace economists were expecting, according to FactSet.

A modest pullback in mortgage rates early this year helped lift home sales in January and February, but rates mostly ticked up in February and March, when many of the home sales that were finalized last month would have taken place.

Mortgage rates have risen the past three weeks, with the average rate on a 30-year mortgage moving this week above 7% to its highest level since late November, mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said Thursday.

The trend is a setback for home shoppers this spring homebuying season, traditionally the housing market’s busiest time of the year.

“Home sales essentially remain stuck because (the) mortgage rate has been stable and inventory is not really rising,” said Lawrence Yun, the NAR’s chief economist.

Despite the pullback in sales, the national median home sales price climbed 4.8% from a year earlier to $393,500. That's the highest median sales price for any March on records going back to 1999 and marks the ninth month in a row that prices have