Pending Home Sales Index

The Pending Home Sales Index is published monthly by the National Association of Realtors and measures housing contract activity based on signed real estate contracts for existing single family homes, condominiums and co-ops in the United States. Because a pending sale, one where a contract has been signed but not yet closed, usually takes four to six weeks to complete, the index leads the National Association of Realtors' own Existing Home Sales figures by roughly a month or two, with more than eighty percent of pending sales going to settlement within that two month window. The index is scaled so that a reading of 100 equals the average level of contract activity recorded in 2001, the first year it covered.