New Home Sales: November 2010

Today, the U.S. Census Department released its monthly New Residential Home Sales Report for November showing a tepid increase of 5.5% in sales since October to a historically weak seasonally adjusted annualized value of 290K annualized units.

On a year-over-year basis, new single family home sales plunged a whopping 21.2% while the monthly supply increased 6.5% to 8.2 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 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)