Lereah on February Pending Sales

Responding to February Pending Home Sales Data:

The Realtors' chief economist, David Lereah, said most of the cooling in the housing market has already happened.

"We can expect a historically strong housing market moving forward, earmarked by generally balanced conditions across the country and fairly stable levels of home sales with some month-to-month fluctuations," Lereah said.

"This normalization is healthy because it is taking a lot of the pressure off of the decision process for both home buyers and sellers -- pressure that was driving abnormal rates of price growth across much of the country over the last few years." Reuters 4/3/06