April existing-home sales inch upward as prices fall

WASHINGTON (AP) — Buyers who were brave enough to dive into the market for a bargain-priced house helped provide a modest boost to sales last month.

Sales of inexpensive foreclosures and other distressed low-end properties have even sparked bidding wars in places such as Las Vegas, Phoenix and Miami. But the market for high-end properties is at a virtual standstill, mainly because it remains difficult to get a mortgage for expensive homes.

“We’re looking at a dual market right now,” said Sherry Chris, chief executive of Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate.

The National Association of Realtors said Wednesday that home sales rose 2.9 percent to an annual rate of 4.68 million in April from a downwardly revised pace of 4.55 million in March. Sales were 4.6 percent below April last year, without adjusting for seasonal factors.

Compared with January, the lowest point in the housing recession, April sales were up nearly 4 percent. But compared with the peak in September 2005, sales are still down 35 percent.

And they have not kept pace with foreclosures, which continue to pile up at an alarming pace. Those properties helped drag down the median sales price to $170,200.

Affordability brought Rogelio Gonzalez, 44, back into the Miami market. Gonzalez sold his five-bedroom home in 2004 for $485,000 and has been renting ever since. Now, prices have dropped to the point where he wants to buy a foreclosure in the $150,000 range, but he’s finding plenty of competition.

“Since I sold at the highest point, I was waiting until I could buy at the lowest point,” Gonzalez said. “I’ve been to open houses and I’ve run into eight, 10, 15 people looking for houses.”

Foreclosures and other distressed sales made up about 45 percent of all transactions in April, according to the Realtors group.

In Phoenix, Floyd Scott, broker-owner of Century 21 Arizona-Foothills, said roughly 70 percent of sales in his area are from distressed buyers. But that can’t last forever, he said, noting that “we’re running out of inventory.”

Nationally, however, the number of unsold homes on the market at the end of April rose almost 9 percent from a month earlier to nearly 4 million.