Having dropped a downwardly revised 8.4 percent in October, the seasonally adjusted pace of new single-family home sales in the U.S. increased 12.4 percent in November to an annualized rate of 744,000 transactions, which was 14.0 percent lower than at the same time last year and 25.1 percent lower than in January.
At the same time, the number of new homes on the market across the country, net of new sales, ticked up another 2.6 percent to 402,000 homes, representing 39 percent more new homes on the market than there were at the same time last year and the most new home inventory since August of 2008, a figure that shouldn’t catch any plugged-in reader’s by surprise.
And while the median price of the homes which sold last month ($416,900) was 2.0 percent higher than in October and 21.6 percent higher than at the same time last year, that’s with 55 percent of the sales having been for homes with a sale price of at least $400,000 last month versus only 35 percent of the sales at the same time last year (i.e., the jump in the median is still being driven by a change in the mix of what’s selling not “appreciation” per se).