April’s new and existing home sales

​There were just two widely watched economic reports released ​last week​:​ the April report on new home sales from the Census bureau, and the Existing Home Sales Report for April from the National Association of Realtors….in addition, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the Regional and State Employment and Unemployment Summary for April this past week, which breaks down the two employment surveys from the monthly national jobs report by state and region….while the text of that report provides a useful summary of this data, the serious statistical aggregation can be found in the tables linked at the end of the report, where one can find the civilian labor force data and the change in payrolls by industry for each of the 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands…

The week also saw the release of the Chicago Fed National Activity Index (CFNAI) for April, a weighted composite index of 85 different economic metrics, which fell to –0.25 in April from +0.03 in March, in an index where any negative reading indicates economic activity has been below the historical trend …despite the April decrease, the ​m​ore often cited 3 month average of the CFNAI was unchanged at +0.05 in April, which thus indicates that national economic activity has averaged slightly above the historical average over those most recent months…

In addition to that national index, index results from another regional Fed manufacturing survey for May was also released this week: the Kansas City Fed manufacturing survey for May, covering western Missouri, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Wyoming and northern New Mexico, reported its broadest composite index came in at -3 in May, up slightly from -4 in April and but down slightly from -2 in March, indicating that a small plurality of the region’s manufacturing firms continued to report a decrease in their activity this month…

New Home Sales Reported Higher in April After Prior Months Sales Revised Lower

The Census report on New Residential Sales for April (pdf) estimated that new single family homes were selling at a seasonally adjusted annual pace of 743,000 homes during the month, which was 10.9 percent (±13.5 percent)* above the revised March annual rate of 670,000 new home sales, and 3.3 percent (±14.7 percent)* above the estimated annual rate that new homes were selling at in April of last year… the figures in parenthesis represent the 90% confidence range for reported data in this report, which has the largest margin of error and is subject to the largest revisions of any census construction series….

With this report; seasonally adjusted estimates of housing units sold, housing units for sale, and the months’ supply of new housing have been revised back to January 2020; and with that, sales of new single family homes in March were revised from the annual rate of 724,000 reported last month to an annual rate of 670,000, and sales in February, initially reported at an annual rate of 664,000 and revised to a 674,000 rate last month, were revised to an annual rate of 653,000, while new home sales in January, initially reported at an annual rate of 657,000 and revised from a 664,000 rate to a 654,000 rate last month, were revised to a 662,000 a year rate with this release…

The annual rates of sales reported here are seasonally adjusted and extrapolated from the rough estimates of canvassing Census field reps, which indicated that approximately 68,000 new single family homes sold in April, up from the estimated 63,000 new homes that sold in March and up from the 57,000 new homes that sold in February….the raw numbers from Census field agents further estimated that the median sales price of new houses sold in April ​r​ose to $407,200, up from the median sales price of $403,700 in March but down from the median sales price of $428,600 in April a year ago, while the average new home sales price was at $518,400, up from the $499,700 average sales price in March, and up from the average sales price of $500,600 in April a year ago….a seasonally adjusted estimate of 504,000 new single family houses remained for sale at the end of April, which represents a 8.1 month supply at the April sales rate, down from the revised 9.1 months of new home supply now being reported for March…

For graphs and commentary on this report, see the following posts by Bill McBride at Calculated Risk: New Home Sales Increase to 743,000 Annual Rate in April and Newsletter: New Home Sales Increase to 743,000 Annual Rate in April, which links to his detailed Real Estate Newsletter post with the same headline..

Existing Home Sales​ were 0.5% Lower in April on Higher Prices

The National Association of Realtors (NAR) reported that seasonally adjusted existing home sales fell by 0.5% from March to April, projecting that 4.00 million existing homes would sell over an entire year if the April home sales pace were extrapolated over that year, a pace that was also 2.0% below the annual sales rate projected during April of a year ago….March sales were unrevised at the 4.02 million annual rate originally reported….the NAR also reported that the median sales price for all existing-home types was at $414,000, an all-time high for the month of April, which they cite as “the 22nd consecutive month of year-over-year price increases"…..the NAR press release, which is titled “Existing-Home Sales Edged Lower by 0.5% in April“, is in easy to read plain English, so if you’re interested in the details on housing inventories, cash sales, distressed sales, first time home buyers, etc, or if you’re interested in a regional breakdown, you can easily find all that in that press release…as sales of existing properties do not add to our national output, neither these home sales nor the prices for which these homes sell are included in GDP, except insofar as real estate, local government and banking services are rendered during the selling process…

Since this report is entirely seasonally adjusted and at a not very informative annual rate, we usually look at the raw data overview (pdf) to see what actually happened during the month…this unadjusted data indicates that roughly 349,000 homes sold in April, up 10.8% from the 315,000 homes that sold in March, but down by 3.1% from the 360,000 homes that sold in April of last year, so we can see the effect of the usual seasonal adjustment on reported sales, as home sales normally increase as spring progresses, and have been lowered accordingly by the seasonal adjustment….also note that same pdf indicates that the median home selling price for all housing types rose by 2.7%, from a revised $403,100 in March to $414,000 in April, and was up by 1.8% from the $406,600 median sales price of last April, with year over year home prices rising 6.3% in the Northeast and 3.6% in the Midwest, but falling 0.1% in the South and 0.2% in the West.…to view both seasonally adjusted and unadjusted graphs and additional commentary on this report, again see the following posts from Bill McBride at Calculated Risk: NAR: Existing-Home Sales Decreased to 4.00 million SAAR in April; Down 2.0% YoY and Newsletter: NAR: Existing-Home Sales Decreased to 4.00 million SAAR in April; Down 2.0% YoY, which in turn links to his in-depth newsletter article on this report…

 

 

(the above is the synopsis that accompanied my regular sunday morning news links emailing, which in turn was mostly selected from my weekly blog post on the global glass onion…if you’d be interested in receiving my weekly emailing of selected links, most of which are chosen from the aforementioned GGO posts, contact me…)