New Home Inventory Up 32 Percent in the U.S., Sales Down

While the seasonally adjusted pace of new single-family home sales in the U.S. ticked up 1.5 percent in August to an annualized rate of 740,000 sales, the current pace of sales is over 24 percent lower than at the same time last year, down 25 percent since the start of this year, and mortgage applications for new home purchases are down as well.

At the same time, there are now 378,000 new single-family homes for sale across the country, representing 32.2 percent more new homes on the market than there were at the same time last year and the most new home inventory in the U.S. since October of 2008, which shouldn’t have caught any plugged-in reader’s by surprise.

And while the median price of the homes which sold last month ($390,900) was unchanged from July and still 20.1 percent higher than at the same time last year, that’s with 51 percent of the sales having been for homes with a sale price of at least $400,000 last month versus only 31 percent of the sales at the same time last year (i.e., it’s the mix not “appreciation” per se).