By Logan Motahami | HousingWire
New home sales came in as a massive beat of sales estimates, with a 28% month-to-month increase. And, out of the 461,000 new homes available for sale, only 49,000 have been completed and are available to be occupied. These are both crazy stats!
Monthly supply data fell — in normal times this would be looked at as a bullish report for housing. However, in this environment, with falling year-over-year purchase application data, this report isn’t as bullish as it seems.
The explanation has a lot to do with the fact that new home sales are already very low, so these month-to-month reports can look wild. We had a period this summer when mortgage rates moved from 6.25% back down to 5% and some of the new home sales activity picked up. In general, however, these data lines are just very volatile and prone to revisions. In fact, we had this happen with new home sales in May, only for the data to revert back to the trend of declining sales.
The Census Bureau reported that sales of new single-family houses in August were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 685,000. This is 28% above the revised July rate of 532,000, but 0.1% below the August 2021 estimate of 686,000.
