National Real Estate Data
· Housing starts rose 4% in August to an annualized pace of 1.6 million; but single family starts were down 3% to a pace of 1.1 million new SFRs.
· Permits rose 6% in August from July and are up 13.5% year over year. But, single family permits only rose 0.6%.
· New home sales which measures signed contracts on new homes (like pendings on existing homes) rose 1.5% in August from July to an annualized pace of 740k. This number is down 24% from a year ago, but this is not surprising as last summer saw insane demand for new homes after the Covid shutdown.
· There were 378k new homes that are being built and in inventory.
· The median sold price was $391k, a 20% increase from a year ago.
· Remember home builders built 15 million homes from 2000-2009; but they only built 9 million in the last decade. This is why we have a huge shortage of homes for sale. Eliott Eisenberg said we need home builders to build and close 2 million new homes a year; this won’t happen.
· CoreLogic released their 2nd quarter Equity Report, showing that home equity increased by 30% from June 2020 to June 2021.
· Only 2.3% of all properties with a mortgage have negative equity. Thus, there will be very few distressed sales.
· Eliott Eisenberg said last Thursday he’s not worried about forbearances increasing inventories too much. I agree.
· Existing home sales which measures closings were down in August by 2.2% from July to an annualized pace of 5.88 million homes.
· Existing home sales are down 15% from a year ago for the same reason new home sales were down.
· The median sold price was $356,700, a 15% increase from last August. But, this increase was 18% in July and 24% in June.
· Cash buyer accounted for 22% of all sales, up from 16% last year.
· Investors purchased 15% of all existing homes last month.
· Brian Wesbury Chief Economist for First Trust Portfolios wrote last week that normally rent increases lag behind the Case-Shiller Home Price Index by about 2 years since the 80’s. But, because we have a HUGE housing shortage rents are already soaring and I expect will continue to do so.