There are more new homes for sale than during any month in three years. Still, the volume of new home sales has diminished from a month earlier and a year earlier.
During August, the sale of 45,000
new privately owned single-family homes was completed — the fewest new houses sold since January’s upwardly revised 45,000.
Including last month’s activity, there have been 422,000 new U.S. residential properties that were sold from Jan. 1 through Aug.
31 of this year.
The data
was delivered Tuesday jointly by the Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
After accounting for seasonal factors, the annual rate of new home sales came to a preliminary 560,000
units last month. The rate receded from an upwardly revised 580,000 in July. But activity accelerated from the downwardly revised 567,000 in August 2016.
At a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 307,000, new home sales in the South, where hurricane-ravaged Florida and Texas are located, were down from July 2017 by 5 percent — more than any other region.
National Association of Home Builders Chief Economist Robert Dietz warned in a written statement that “we may see more volatility in the next few months as communities affected by the recent hurricanes experience construction delays and other economic disruptions.”
A 2.6 percent decline in the Northeast put the rate there at 38,000, while a 2.7 percent drop in the West left the rate at 146,000.
But the Midwest saw no change in new home sales, leaving the seasonally adjusted annual rate there at 69,000.
August 2017’s activity left a seasonally adjusted 284,000 U.S. new single-family properties for sale. That worked out to a 6.1-month supply — the biggest supply since it was 6.1 months in July 2014.
The report indicated that the median sales price was $300,200 in August, and the average sales price was $368,100.
