New home sales fell under 600,000 for the first time since August 2017, according to the latest Census Bureau new home sales report…(Census Bureau)
- M-O-M: Sales of new single‐family homes fell 8.1% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 590,000 in June.
- Y-O-Y: New home sales are now down 17.4% when compared to the same time one year ago.
SWING & A MISS: Economists had projected that sales would actually climb 2.8% in June.
If not for the South the sales numbers would be downright terrifying. New home sales in the South fell just 2.0% in June to a seasonally adjusted rate of 390,000. This is more than 3x that of the next closest region and represents 66.1% of all activity nationwide.
- The West took the number two spot even with an absolutely massive 36.7% drop to 112k followed by the Midwest which saw an even bigger jump up (+42.3%) to an annual rate of 74,000 and the Northeast was a distant fourth thanks to 5.2% drop to 18k.
Kind of surprising that inventory levels didn’t see a big uptick but the slowing pace meant months of supply increased somewhat substantially…
- The seasonally‐adjusted estimate of new houses for sale at the end of June was 457,000, this is up from the 444,000 reported in May
- Inventory levels represented a supply of 9.3 months at the current sales rate, this is up from the 7.7 months reported last month.
The median sales price of a new home sold in June fell 10.4% to $402,400 in June and the average sales price was down 10.7% to $456,800