Having ticked down an upwardly revised 1.2 percent in February, the seasonally adjusted pace of new single-family home sales in the U.S. dropped 8.6 percent in March to an annualized rate of 763,000 sales. As such, the pace of sales last month was 12.6 percent lower than at the same time last year despite a marked increase in inventory.
And with the drop in sales, there were 407,000 new homes on the market at the end of March, representing 33 percent more inventory than at the same time last year and the most new homes on the market since August of 2008, while mortgage application volumes to purchase said homes continues to drop and mortgage rates continue to spike, a trio of trends that shouldn’t have caught any plugged-in readers by surprise.
