WASHINGTON, DC-The National Association of Realtors reports that existing-home sales  increased 3.4% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.62 million in April. That is an increase from a downwardly revised 4.47 million in March, and a 10% increase year over year from April 2011.

Perhaps most notably in the report, the uptick in sales can be attributed to individual home buyers as well as investors that have been moving into the sector looking for distressed assets. For this reason, investors that are scooping up distressed single-family homes can no longer assume the investment will pay off as it would have two years ago, Lawrence Yun, NAR chief economist, tells GlobeSt.com.

"Phoenix home prices are already rising," he notes. "The low point is past for single-family home investors." There is, however, some opportunity still available in the Midwest.

Yun has better news for investors and builders of multifamily product. Household formation was so suppressed during the recession that the pent-up demand is enough to keep both the single family and multifamily markets very busy. "There's usually a trade off between home buying versus renting with macroeconomic trends," he says, meaning one is usually more favored by current economic trends than the other depending on the particular point in the cycle.

Not so right now, though, he adds. "We're seeing an increase in both home buying and renting," according to Yun. "The pent-up demand for household formation is so great that it will lead to both a net increase absorption of multifamily space and increase in home sales."

NAR's data is welcome news in the ongoing debate in the commercial real estate sector over whether multifamily development and investment may becoming overheated, or worse, headed for a bubble. Yun's conclusions echo earlier research by NAREIT, which found that there is a record level of pent-up demand for apartment space, with an approximately 2.5-million-unit supply-demand imbalance in apartment inventory.