Housing Pothole or Data Volatility
The last Census Bureau Survey of New Home Sales showed a lower increase than most expected (417,000, or 1.5% above the previous month). Part of the reason for the lower growth rate was an upward...
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New Home Sales Spike As Prices Fall
Real estate markets continued the blistering pace of new home sales in June, according to Census Bureau estimates. Year-over-year, seasonally adjusted growth was 38.1% to an annual rate of 497,000; the...
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Academics Are Always Last To Know
The annual Jackson Hole central banker extravaganza is in full swing and ZeroHedge notes a couple of important new factors in the ongoing taper drama. First, an academic “study” on how to withdraw QE...
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The Fed Gets Its Wish
For about three hours last Wednesday the goals of the Ben Bernanke led Fed were achieved when the NASDAQ market stopped trading due to a technical glitch. With no quotes available, investors were not...
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Housing Tapers
The National Association of Realtors estimated that pending homes sales declined 1.6% in August from July. In July, pending sales slipped 1.4% from June. That makes three consecutive months of slightly...
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Home Sales Follow Mortgages
There is, of course, an intermediate step between mortgage finance and home construction – new home sales. So it stands to reason that given the collapse in mortgage finance (demand) and the correlated...
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Census Confirms NAR’s Absence of Snow
Not much new commentary is needed with the new home sales data from the Census Bureau since analysis of the NAR home sale data last week also applies in full part here. It does bear repeating, however,...
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Bubbles Doing What Bubbles Do
Economists blaming weather for the real estate/housing “pause” were cautiously optimistic for March ahead of this week’s housing data windfall. Economists expect that sales rose 2.3 percent to a...
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Last Year’s Master Is This Year’s Victim
I often stand in amazement at what passes for conventional wisdom, or more precisely what is being attempted as such. Only one year ago the tendency to view the housing market as the next great growth...
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Housing Contradictions
In contrast to existing home sales there has been no real bounce in new home sales. Again, that more than contradicts the idea of a home shortage (or at least a true market shortage, there may be a...
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What’s Behind New Home Sales
New home sales rose on a year-over-year basis, but the adjusted figures suggest that says more about softness in July 2013 than strength in July 2014. Whatever the case may actually be, the...
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Confounding Home Sales
There was a surge in new home sales reported last week, breaking the current flat trend that extended back well beyond last year’s MBS problems. The huge increase in sales, so out of character with...
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Real Estate Visibility Clouded by Sharp Revisions
The Census Bureau is seemingly out to prove the point that monthly variations in home sales data are really meaningless. Downward revisions after last month’s curious “surge” in new home sales place...
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No GDP Resonance In New Home Sales Either
Perhaps the BEA should have moved the GDP release up a few days to allow mainstream commentary its unbridled and unstained euphoria. Almost as soon as the GDP revisions were released, the upward...
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There Is Some Marginal Use in New Home Sales Figures
The level of new home sales seemed to take another run at the 500k seasonally-adjusted annual rate in December. This would be the third time in 2014 that the pace of sales reached a new high point for...
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New Home Sales Confirm Resales; New Home Prices Confirm Bubble
The pace of new home sales continues to be stuck right below that 500k SAAR, a flattening of activity that dates back really to January 2013. The data has at times peaked above 500k only to be revised...
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A Realistic Scenario For Unrealistic New Homes
At first glance, yesterday’s release of new home sales estimates defied any sense of sense. As such, it seemed better to simply let it alone until revisions attempt to address the extreme outlier...
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Home Construction Headwind
The latest figures from the Census Bureau on home construction continue to suggest that the home sales number from last month was, at best, a one-off abnormality. If new home sales were heading...
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Zero-sum Real Estate?
Recent real estate figures for new home sales and existing home sales do not seem to agree on where the real estate market is trending. The new home sales numbers from the Census Bureau have been...
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Homebuilder Mini-Cycles Too
So far this year, there has been a divergence in the housing statistics about the state of real estate markets in the US. The National Association of Realtors (NAR) estimates that existing home sales...
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