Pending home sales continued to rebound across the country in June

The index of pending home sales rose 16.6% in June as compared with May, the National Association of Realtors reported Wednesday.

The increase comes after pending home sales experienced the largest monthly rise on record last month, the trade group said.

Compared with a year ago, contract signings were up 6.3%, a sign of how sharply the market has rebounded from its coronavirus-related low.

“It is quite surprising and remarkable that, in the midst of a global pandemic, contract activity for home purchases is higher compared to one year ago,” Lawrence Yun, the National Association of Realtors’ chief economist, said in the report. “Consumers are taking advantage of record-low mortgage rates resulting from the Federal Reserve’s maximum liquidity monetary policy.”

The index measures real-estate transactions where a contract was signed for a previously-owned homes but the sale had not yet closed, benchmarked to contract-signing activity in 2001.

What happened: Every region experienced a monthly increase in pending home sales, led by the Northeast (up 54.4%). However, the Northeast was the only region that did not experience a year-over-year uptick in contract signings, a reflection of the longer pandemic-related lockdowns in those states.

The trade group now expects that existing-home sales will only drop by 3% for all of 2020.