12/23/2022
New Home Sales
New Home Sales, which measures signed contracts on new homes, rose 5.8% in November to a 640-unit annualized pace. This was much stronger than estimates that were looking for a 4.7% decline. Last month’s figure was revised lower, which made the gain today appear bigger. When taking that into account, sales still rose 1.3%. Sales are now down 12.3% from last year. Since rates continued to improve in December, we expect the next report to show more activity. Next week the more important Pending Home Sales report will be released, showing buyers signing contracts on existing homes in November. And since rates did drop from October, it will be interesting to see if we see a pickup in activity like we saw in today’s report. There were 461,000 new homes for sale at the end of November, a drop of 2.3% from October. At the current pace of sales, there is an 8.6 month’s supply. However, only 64,000 or 14% are completed. When looking at the pace of sales vs homes that are completed, there is only a 1.7 months’ supply. The median home price fell 3% last month to $471,000, but this can be skewed due to the mix of sales. There was a big uptick in sales of homes in the $500,000 and over segments. On a year over year basis the median home price is 10% higher.
