Now this is a real surprise, the good kind.New home sales surged 11% in the past month, to a seasonally adjusted rate of 384,000, according to the Wall Street Journal(subscription required).
The Commerce Department reported that year over year, sales are still down 21.3%. The median price was $206,000 in June, down 12% from $234,000 in June 2008.
Housing starts rose 3.6% to 582,000. By region sales were:
- Sales in the Northeast were up 29.2%
- In the Midwest sales rose 43.1%
- The West saw a sales jump of 22.6%
- In the South sales fell 5.3%
Whatever the reasons, maybe price levels, are triggering buyers to come back into the market. This 11% gain could be the start or a real turnaround in housing market. If this pace continues for the rest of the year, we most assuredly will have turned the corner.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
7-28-2009 @ 5:15AM
al coholic said...
Take off your rose colored glasses, Connie. New housing starts of 582,000? That's not just poor...it's catastrophic!
30 years ago, when there were 50 million people fewer in the US housing starts were about a million.
We have had dips in housing before but never before has the price of housing declined everywhere in America. In the past housing prices only tumbled in the highly speculative markets like Vegas, Florida, and SoCal.
Over the last decade people have been buying houses not for their needs but for their profit potential. I think that millions of Americans will now change their house buying habits and will not continue to buy way more house than they need, in hope that appreciation will provide them with a piggy bank of equity to buy consumer toys.