The US housing market grew sharply last year

The US residential real estate market has grown rapidly.

The US housing real estate market grew rapidly in 2020. This is despite the fact that the pandemic of the new coronavirus has caused one of the sharpest economic downturns in modern history. Americans took advantage of low interest rates on mortgages and bought houses and apartments. The significant increase in sales of new and older homes as well as construction clearly shows the different impact that the pandemic has had on Americans. Tens of millions of people lost their jobs due to the corona crisis, while others, on the other hand, could afford to buy real estate. The situation in the residential real estate market also developed differently from the global financial crisis of 2008, when outstanding mortgages were at the center of the crisis and when the US housing market collapsed. Sales of existing homes in the United States were the highest since 2006, according to the NAR National Real Estate Association. Sales increased by 5.6% to 5.64 million homes compared to 2019. The U.S. Department of Commerce will not release a report on new home sales until next week. In the first 11 months of 2020, the full-year rate of sales on a seasonally adjusted basis reached 841,000 residential units, which was 20.8% more than in the same month of 2019. "Even better, this momentum is likely to carry over into the new year, when more people are expected to enter the market." said NAR chief economist Lawrence Yun.