Ahead of the Bell: Existing Home Sales

The National Association of Realtors' report on sales of existing homes in the U.S. is scheduled for release at 10 a.m. EDT.

Sales are expected to rise 2.2 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5 million units, up from 4.89 million in April, according to the consensus forecast of Wall Street economists surveyed by Thomson/IFR.

April's sales results were the lowest on the trade group's records, which date back to 1999. In April, the median sales price for an existing home dropped 8 percent to $202,300 compared with a year ago.

Home prices in cities around the country are tumbling at the sharpest rates ever, and some economists say the market's bottom is still at least a year away.

Two separate measurements of U.S. home prices--the Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller home price indexes and the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight index--on Tuesday reported record year-over-year declines in April.

The last holdout in the Case-Shiller index, Charlotte, N.C., finally succumbed to the national housing downturn, with prices slipping 0.1 percent from a year ago. No city in the Case-Shiller 20-city index appreciated in April, the first time that's happened since its inception in 2000.