US New Home Sales Crash In November, Despite Plunging Rates

While existing home sales bounced very modestly off record lows in November, it has been the ‘strength’ of new home sales – with buyer heavily subsidized by homebuilders – that has held up the housing market.

Of course, investors don’t care about actual fundamentals, rates are down so ‘buy buy buy’ the builders…

Source: Bloomberg

Trouble is, even as mortgage rates have plunged recently, applications for home purchases has continued to decline…

Source: Bloomberg

And while mortgage rates have declined (rapidly), they remain massively high relative to the effective mortgage rate for all Americans. That difference is the ‘subsidy‘ that homebuilders have to fill to enable buyers – and it’s still yuuuge!

Source: Bloomberg

So, just how many new homes were sold in November?

The last few months have been very choppy for new home sales but November clarified that homebuilders just hit a wall on their subsidization!

New home sales crashed 12.2% MoM – the biggest MoM drop since April 2022. That dragged the YoY change to just 1.4%…

Source: Bloomberg

9 of the last 10 months have seen downward revisions to the new home sales SAAR!

Source: Bloomberg

New home sales fell in the South by the most, followed by the West. The Northeast and Midwest saw increased sales…

Source: Bloomberg

The new home sales SAAR printed 590k (well below the 690k exp) – the lowest since Nov 2022… catching down to existing home sales reality…

Source: Bloomberg

And another catch-up to reality for sales, even as rates tumble…

Source: Bloomberg

Finally, we note that the median new home priced jumped to $434.7k from $414.9k…

Source: Bloomberg

The median existing home price dropped to lowest since April while median new home price jumped to highest since August

Odd that these ‘actual’ new home sales are plunging as ‘soft survey’ data shows homebuilder sentiment rising, and housing starts.