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New Home Sales Crush Forecasts, Soaring to 14-Year Highs
Thursday, September 24, 2020
Once again new home sales exceeded
expectations, this time by a lot. Sales of newly built homes rose 4.8 percent
in August, to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.011 million. That puts sales
an astounding 43.2 percent higher than they were the previous August. It was
the sixth straight month of rising sales. After such a string of increases, analysts
had expected sales to pull back a bit. Those polled by Econoday were
looking for the number to come in between 820,000 and 950,000 with a consensus
of 875,000. Perhaps they would have come up with a better forecast had they
known that the July number from the Census Bureau and Department of Housing and
Urban Development, would be upgraded substantially. The original estimate of 901,000,
was revised to 965,000. On a non-adjusted basis, sales were
unchanged from July at 83,000 units. For the year-to-date there have been
543,000 new homes sold, a 14.9 percent increase from the 472,000 sales over the
first eight months of 2019.
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