How confident are you in this economy?

We'll look at the state of housing, small business, and jobs from American public media.

This is Marketplace.

In Baltimore, I'm Amy Scott in Forkai, Rizdal.

It's Wednesday, March 29th. Good to have you with us.

It is spring, the time of year-wind daffodils, and for sales signs typically start popping up in front yards, traditionally anyway.

And after a long winter for housing, there have been some signs of a thaw.

We learned today from the National Association of Realtors that pending sales of existing homes picked up in February for the third straight month.

Those are homes under contracts that will show up as official sales in the coming months.

And this follows last week's news that sales completed in February rose for the first time in a year.

Marketplace's Sabri Beneshor has the story.

The housing market has been in the dumps these past six months or so.

Compared to February a year ago, pending home sales were down 21%.

Carl Tannenbaum is chief economist at Northern Trust.

We've had much higher interest rates and because we've had a depletion in some quarters of pandemic-related saving,

money for down payments is not as readily available as it once was.

But that said, compared to the month before, pending home sales crept up in February, 0.8%.

Third positive month in a row.

Now, pending home sales are not done deals. They're just pending, meaning the paperwork started, but the actual closing probably won't happen for a month or two.

So more housing paperwork in February is actually a sign of something that happened a month or two earlier.

Nadia Evangelou is senior economist for the National Association of Realtors.

The main reason for that was because of the lower mortgage rates that we had actually in December in January.

...