Selling New One Family Homes in America

While there have been modest improvements in the U.S. housing market, one key metric is still looking pretty sad.

 

Here is a graph from FRED showing the number of new one family homes sold in the United States:

 

 

You can readily see the dropping sales as the Great Recession (in grey) took hold.  Since then, sales have risen from a low of 280,000 on an annualized basis in May 2010 to the current level of 437,000, a respectable increase of 35.9 percent over less than three years.  Time to celebrate!

 

But hang on a minute.  Let's look at the whole picture from FRED showing the number of new one family homes sold on a monthly basis going all the way back to the early 1960s:

 

 

The number of new one family homes sold peaked at a whopping 1,389 million units on an annualized basis in July 2005, then dropping to the aforementioned 280,000 in May 2010, a drop of 79.8 percent!  Housing sales had been above the 1 million units for quite an extended period of time, basically remaining there between August of 2002 and November 2006.

 

With the current level of one family housing reaching its new post-Great Recession high of 437,000 units, keep in mind that all data has to be put into its long-term context.  After all, the current level is still 66 percent off its peak and is at levels below where it stood for nearly all of the sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties and into the new millennium when the population of the United States was far lower than it is today. 

 

That can hardly be termed healthy, can it?

 

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