A Healthy Housing Industry Emerging: Existing Home Sales by Region 2014 to 2017 (January)
July 10,
2017 by HFBusiness Staff in General 
This is the second factoid in a series of four factoids detailing the continued growth of the post-recession Housing Industry. After years of fighting back from the housing bubble pop, the Housing Industry is finally on the mend and appears to be getting healthier by the year. Although still shy of 2007 pre-recession levels, housing appears to be catching up fast despite a couple of stumbles last year.
The rate of growth slowed for existing home sales last year but unit sales approached pre-recession levels. Meanwhile, new home sales, while still well below pre-recession numbers, are catching up to pent up demand as housing construction steadily increases its new single family homebuilding.
Existing home sales grew consistently throughout the country last year. The Northeast region, the smallest in terms of home sales, was the fastest growing last year – up 5.7 percent 2015 to 2016 to 740,000 units plus an 8.1 percent boost (seasonally annualized) to start off 2017. Increasing 2.8 percent from 2015 to 2016, the South still leads the pack with 2.2 million existing houses sold in 2016. The Midwest had a slight decline from 2016 to January 2017 – down 0.8 percent to 1.3 million annualized resales, while the West had the biggest leap into 2017 – increasing 8.4 percent in January to 1.29 million annualized units. The next factoid will detail new housing construction.
Source: National Association of Realtors
*based on houses sold in January 2017