June’s new home sales; unemployment claims at a 56+ year low
The only widely watched report released last week was the June report on new home sales from the Census bureau…. but the week also saw the release of the Chicago Fed National Activity Index (CFNAI) for June, a weighted composite index of 85 different economic metrics, which came in at to –0.02 in June, up from a downwardly revised –0.19 in May, in an index where any negative reading indicates economic activity has been below the historical trend…that left the more often cited three month average of the index at -0.05 in June, up from a revised -0.10 in May, indicating that national economic activity has continued to be slightly below the historical trend over those recent months…
Also of note, the Labor Department reported the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims for unemployment insurance for the week ending July 18th was at 187,000, a decrease of 22,000 from the previous week's revised level, and the lowest since September 6th, 1969, when the US labor force was less than half the size it is today…
The week also saw the release another regional Fed manufacturing surveys for July: the Kansas City Fed manufacturing survey for July, covering western Missouri, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Wyoming and northern New Mexico, reported their broadest composite index fell to fell to +9 in July, down from +11 in June but up from +8 in May, indicating that a modest plurality of the region’s manufacturers continued to report improving business metrics in July, just as it did in those prior months…
New Home Sales Little Changed in June; Average Sales Prices at a 57 Month Low
The Census report on New Residential Sales for June (pdf) estimated that new single family homes were selling at a seasonally adjusted rate of 628,000 homes annually during the month, which was 1.6 percent (±14.8 percent)* above the revised May rate of 618,000 new single family home sales annually, but was 5.6 percent (±13.2 percent)* below the estimated annual rate that new homes were selling at in June of last year….the asterisks indicate that based on their small sampling, Census could not be certain whether June new home sales rose or fell from those of May, or even from June of last year, with the figures in parenthesis representing 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….hence, these initial new home sales reports are not very reliable and often see significant revisions…with this report; sales of new single family homes in May were revised up from the 580,000 annual rate reported last month to a 618,000 annual rate, while April’s annualized home sale rate, initially reported at a 622,000 rate, were revised from last months first revision of 626,000 up to 646,000, and while March’s new home sales, initially reported at an annual rate of 682,000 and revised from a revised annual rate of 663,000 to an annual rate of to a 664,000 rate last month, were revised to an annual rate of 659,000 with this report…
The annual rates of sales reported here were extrapolated from the estimates of canvassing Census field reps, which indicated that approximately 54,000 new single family homes sold in June, down from the estimated 55,000 new homes that sold in May, and down from the estimated 61,000 new homes that sold in April….the raw figures from Census field agents further led to an estimate that the median sales price of new houses sold in June was $398,300, the lowest median new home sales price since last July, down from the median sale price of $412,000 in May, and down from the median price of $409,200 in June of last year, while the average June new home sales price was at $475,400, the lowest average sales price since September 2021, down from the revised $508,700 average in May and down from the average sales price of $495,500 in June a year ago….a seasonally adjusted estimate of 485,000 new single family houses remained for sale at the end of June, which represented a 9.3 month supply at the June sales rate, down from the 9.4 month supply in May, which was originally reported as a 10.8 month supply….
(the above is the economic reports 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…)
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