Wednesday, August 25, 2010

New Home Sales: July 2010

Today, the U.S. Census Department released its monthly New Residential Home Sales Report for July showing another stunning decline with sales dropping to an all-time low of 276K annualized units.

New single family home sales plunged 12.4% since June and a whopping 32.4% below the level seen in July 2009 while the monthly supply jumped up to 9.1 months and the median months for sale declined to 11.3 months.

These results provide even more evidence that the government's housing tax scam policy was ultimately a complete and total failure accomplishing nothing but creating a temporary distortion of the underlying "organic" housing trends.

With numbers this weak, it could even be argued that the government's tax gimmick ultimately further destabilized the nation's home markets by injecting a substantial amount of uncertainty, sponsoring feeble home buyers and preventing the natural market clearing mechanism from playing out.

The following charts show the extent of sales decline (click for full-larger version)