On Tuesday, the National Association of Realtors announced that the pending home sales index for June jumped 3.6 percent. The gain is the fifth such monthly gain in a row and represents the longest string of surges in six years! Year-over-year comparisons also now show improvement — up 6.7 percent since June of 2008. In fact pending home sale contract levels are registering their greatest activity since June of 2007 — two years ago.

The consensus forecast was that the index would increase only 0.7 percent. In fact in a Bloomberg survey of 35 projections everyone was surprised by the strong jump. Forecasts had ranged from predicting a 1.2 percent drop to a estimate of a 3 percent gain.

Tuesday’s report from the national association follows the July 23 release showing home resales in June rising for a third straight month. That was following by further good news on July 27th when data showed that sales of new homes soared 11 percent in June, the most since 2000.

In early June we made the claim that recovery had started for this US growth cycle. All of June’s housing data now supports that claim as well.

Another big surprise to most economists will be the strength of the recovery as measured by GDP growth in Q3.

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