Category: Home Sales
-
Crossing the Line
The week’s headline was the announcement by the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) that interest rates for the 30-year conforming mortgage had crossed the 5.0% line, with FHA and jumbo loans close behind. All the rates quoted by MBA (which differ slightly from Freddie Mac’s) were the highest in at least seven years. Rates have been…
-
Spring Sales Spring
Each month the housing news seems to hit all at once and this was April’s big week. First were March home sales, new and existing. Both held their own, looking Spring Market-like despite unseasonal weather and tiny inventories. Rising prices provided the second piece of the week’s news, although it wasn’t terribly newsy. Existing home…
-
Swinging Into Spring – March 30th
New home sales are off to a ragged start in 2018. Sales fell by 7.8% in January after plunging 9.3% in December although an upward revision of about 30,000 annualized units did take a little of the sting out of the January loss. That recalculation, which brought January sales up to an annual rate of…
-
It’s All About Inventories
Sales of new homes in January were every bit as good as those released last week for existing homes. There were an estimated 41,000 newly built homes sold during the month compared to 38,000 in December. On a seasonally adjusted annual basis that works out to a pace of 555,000 units, up 3.7% from December…
-
Pending Home Sales Up
As reported last week, home sales finished out the year on a down note with both new home and existing home sales retreating from November’s levels. Rising interest rates along with an inventory of existing homes that was the smallest in the National Association of Realtors’ (NAR’s) record books got the blame. Sales numbers…
-
Tough Sledding
Despite taking a dip in December, existing home sales still closed out 2016 as their best year since 2006. The National Association of Realtors (NAR) said that over the 12 months an estimated 5.45 million single-family houses, townhomes, condos, and cooperative apartments changed hands. This was 200,000 more units than sold in all of 2015…
-
Getting a Jump
Housing news this week was dominated by construction reports. Well, maybe dominated is too strong a word–there wasn’t much competition. A burst of enthusiasm on the part of homebuilders last month had carried the National Association of Homebuilders (NAHB) Housing Market Index to a 12-year high. NAHB said builder confidence moderated a bit this month;…
-
Playing Catch-Up
The Old Year and our two-week break has left us with a lot of make-up work. While sales and pricing data dominated the usual end-of-month flood and was largely positive, the Census Bureau’s construction numbers took some of the edge off. The two backward looking reports on home sales–new, and existing–continued to show a…
-
Where to Begin
It is rare indeed when we can report on new, existing, and pending home sales in one fell swoop but all three reports were issued while many of us were enjoying friends, family, turkey and pie. The data was mixed, and relatively flat, but then we are morphing into the holiday rather than the home…
-
Rare and Endangered
We have talked a lot about the dismal post-housing crash stats on homeownership. They hit the lowest level in Census Bureau history in the second quarter of this year, 63.1%. Well, surprise. They didn’t get any better in the third quarter. While the overall rate did rise to 63.4% on a seasonally adjusted basis, the…