Having dropped a downwardly revised 10.5 percent in March, the seasonally adjusted pace of new single-family home sales in the U.S. fell another 16.6 percent in April and has plunged nearly 30 percent since the start of the year to an annualized rate of 591,000 sales, which is 26.9 percent lower than at the same time last year despite a marked increase in inventory.
In fact, with the drop in sales, there were 444,000 new homes on the market at the end of April, representing 40 percent more inventory than at the same time last year and the most new homes on the market since May of 2008, while mortgage application volumes to purchase said homes continues to drop, trends that shouldn’t have caught any plugged-in readers by surprise.
