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The DeskToday

Pending home sales fell 2.3% in July to the lowest level since January

NAR's index of signed contracts, released 18 August, points at the closings a coordinator will be working through September and October. All four regions declined month over month, the West by 4.7%, and Redfin's faster weekly series shows the same pipeline flat rather than recovering.

TC Bulletin Staff8 min readRead as markdown

What this story establishes

  • NAR's Pending Home Sales Index fell 2.3% month over month and 2.2% year over year in July 2026, to 71.2, its lowest reading since January 2026. NAR released the figure on 18 August 2026.
  • All four regions fell month over month: West 4.7%, South 2.2%, Northeast 2.0%, Midwest 0.7%. Year over year only the Midwest rose, by 1.7%, while the West fell 7.1%.
  • Because the index counts signed contracts and NAR states it leads closings by one to two months, this is the clearest available read on September and October closing volume.
  • Redfin's weekly count for the four weeks ending 9 August 2026 put pending sales at 314,136, down 1.6% year over year and up 0.4% week over week, which it described as the lowest level since March except for the prior week.
  • NAR chief economist Lawrence Yun states pending contracts are '30% below their pre-pandemic 2019 level, while payroll employment is 5% above.'

The number that tells a coordinator what October looks like came out yesterday, and it went down. The National Association of REALTORS reported on 18 August 2026 that its Pending Home Sales Index fell 2.3% in July to 71.2, the lowest reading since January, and 2.2% below July of last year.

That index counts signed contracts rather than closings. NAR's methodology states that a home 'goes under contract a month or two before it is sold,' so the index 'generally leads Existing-Home Sales by a month or two.' Files signed in July are the files closing in September and, for the slower ones, October. A desk looking at its own calendar for those months is looking at the same cohort this index just measured.

What the faster series says about August

NAR's index covers July. Redfin publishes a weekly count that already covers the first part of August, and it does not show a rebound. For the four weeks ending 9 August 2026, Redfin put pending sales at 314,136, down 1.6% from a year earlier and up 0.4% from the prior week, a level it described as the lowest since March apart from the week before it. Redfin is a brokerage rather than an association or an agency, and it states its weekly data is subject to revision, but it is the only published series covering that period at all.

Two supporting indicators in the same Redfin release point the same way. Mortgage-purchase applications, from the Mortgage Bankers Association, rose 3% week over week but were down 1% year over year. Touring activity, from ShowingTime, was up 12% from the start of the year, against 29% at the equivalent point of 2025.

Where the work is still growing

The national figure conceals unusually wide local variation this year, and for a coordinator deciding whether to take on another agent the local number is the only one that matters. NAR published metro-level annual changes in pending sales alongside the July index, drawn from Realtor.com Economics data. Among the 50 largest metros, the largest annual increases were Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk at 17.2%, San Antonio-New Braunfels at 11.8%, Cincinnati at 6.2%, Pittsburgh at 3.7% and Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach at 2.4%.

Redfin's own July metro figures, published 12 August 2026, tell a compatible story from a different dataset. It recorded closed sales up 17.1% year over year in West Palm Beach, 8.5% in San Francisco and 7% in Milwaukee, against declines of 12.6% in San Antonio, 10% in Dallas and 9.9% in Fort Worth. San Antonio appearing near the top of NAR's pending list and the bottom of Redfin's closed list is exactly what a leading indicator looks like when a market turns.

The longer measure underneath

Yun set the current level against a longer baseline that is worth carrying into any capacity decision: 'Right now, pending contracts are 30% below their pre-pandemic 2019 level, while payroll employment is 5% above. That gap points to sizable pent-up demand that should be unleashed in the coming years as more supply reaches the market and affordability improves.'

That is an association's chief economist making a forecast, and it should be read as one. The measurable half of the statement is the first sentence. Contract activity is running roughly a third below where it ran before 2020 while employment is higher, and the profession's total addressable work is smaller than the population of working homeowners would suggest.

What to do with this before the next release

  1. Expect September and October closing volume to run at or slightly below August. The July contract cohort is what feeds those months and it shrank.
  2. Check your own region against the national figure. A Midwest desk saw pending contracts rise 1.7% year over year; a Western desk saw them fall 7.1%. Those are different businesses.
  3. If you work a metro on either list above, use the metro number rather than the national one. The spread between the best and worst large metros this July was roughly 30 percentage points.
  4. The next Pending Home Sales release, covering August, is scheduled for 10 September 2026. That is the number that describes November closings.
  5. Treat Redfin's weekly series as an early warning rather than a forecast, and remember it is a brokerage's own data and revisable.