April’s pending home sales climbed to their highest level since February 2023, and the median U.S. sale price posted its biggest year-over-year gain in 13 months, according to a Redfin report released Tuesday.
The leading indicators ran ahead of the closed-sales data released Monday by the National Association of Realtors, which showed existing-home sales rose just 0.2 percent month over month in April.
Pending sales rose 2 percent month over month to 350,521, which is the largest monthly increase since March 2025. Existing-home sales, as measured by Redfin, hit a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.33 million, also a three-year high.
The median U.S. sale price climbed 2.4 percent year over year to $396,173, per Redfin. That marks the largest annual gain since March 2025.
Sellers moved as well. Active listings rose 1.3 percent month over month to 1.48 million, the highest level since March 2020 and the largest monthly increase in a year. New listings climbed 2.7 percent from March to their highest level since July 2022.
Redfin notes that April is the first release under an updated monthly housing data methodology that aggregates figures directly across more than 3,000 counties rather than scaling from a representative sample.
Selling speed picked up for the second consecutive month. The typical home that went under contract in April did so in 49 days, one day faster than in March. Homes still take longer to sell than they did a year ago, and sales and listings remain below pre-pandemic levels.
The share of homes selling below their original list price has now declined for six consecutive months, falling to 60.5 percent in April. Redfin attributes the trend to growing buyer demand and to sellers pricing more competitively. The median new list price rose 0.9 percent year over year — less than half the gain on the median sale price.
The 30-year fixed mortgage rate averaged 6.33 percent in April, down 0.4 percentage points from a year earlier.
San Francisco posted the broadest gains among the 50 most populous U.S. metros, with median sale prices up 10.7 percent year over year, pending sales up 20.8 percent and closed sales up 23 percent. West Palm Beach, Florida, recorded the sharpest pending-sales jump at 39.8 percent.
