August home sales in state reach record 3,647

A record 3,647 homes were sold in August in the 43 Arkansas counties surveyed by the Arkansas Realtors Association.

August sales surpassed the June total of 3,629 as the highest monthly total since 2006, when sales first were compiled by the Realtors association. It was also the sixth-consecutive month with a sales total above 3,000 — 3,067 in March, 3,065 in April, 3,568 in May, 3,629 in June and 3,480 in July.

Pulaski, Benton and Washington counties continued to grow at a strong pace, Mervin Jebaraj, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, said Friday.

Pulaski County Realtors sold 531 homes in August, up 9.3 percent compared with August last year. Sales totaled 658 homes in Benton County, up 13.6 percent, and Washington County sales were 410 in August, up almost 20 percent.

The housing market slowed in the first part of the year after the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates, said Tim King, who started a real estate firm in Little Rock this year, Realty Brokers of Arkansas.

The slowdown continued somewhat through the summer, King said.

“But now, for about the past 45 days or so, it seems like to me that there are a lot more buyers in the market,” King said. “More people seem to be listing their homes. And my business has picked up in the last two months.”

Home prices are also going up, Jebaraj said.

“People are trying to get ahead of further price increases,” Jebaraj said. “But what is also pushing is mortgage rates are starting to climb again. And that definitely will have the effect of getting more people into the market before the mortgage rates get much higher.”

A conventional 30-year fixed mortgage rate is about 4.8 percent to 5 percent, said Scott McElmurry, chief executive officer of Bank of Little Rock Mortgage, one of the larger mortgage lenders in the state.

A conventional 15-year fixed mortgage rate is about 4.3 percent to 4.5 percent, McElmurry said.

For the year, 25,056 homes were sold through August in the 43-county area surveyed each month by the Realtors association. That is up 4.6 percent when compared with the first eight months of 2017.

“We’re now in our sixth year of very strong homesales growth,” said Michael Pakko, chief economist at the Arkansas Economic Development Institute at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

The housing market had a long way to go to make up for depressed sales after the extended recession, Pakko said.

“But the fact that we’re at 4.6 percent growth six years after things really started to take off shows that sales are still pretty strong,” Pakko said.

In his annual projections for the Arkansas economy, Pakko predicted last fall that home sales may finish the year up 8 percent to 9 percent.

Home sales likely will end the year lower than that, but 4.6 percent growth still is robust, Pakko said.