New Home Sales Jump 11.1% in March

The Commerce department reported on Monday that sales of newly built homes jumped 11.1% in March. This was a bigger jump than expected, yet the month’s new-home sales …

The Commerce department reported on Monday that sales of newly built homes jumped 11.1% in March. This was a bigger jump than expected, yet the month’s new-home sales figure remained 21.9% below earlier-year levels. Read more about this in the full article from The Street.

Sales of newly built homes jumped 11.1% in March to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 300,000, the Commerce Department said early Monday, a bigger jump than expected.

The figure was expected to come in at a rate of 280,000, according to consensus estimates at Briefing.com, after sales of newly built homes plunged in February to a revised rate of 270,000, one of the worst rates on record since 1962.

March’s new-home sales figure remained 21.9% below year-earlier levels.

The median sale price of new homes sold last month was $213,800; the average sales price was $246,800.

Claim up to $26,000 per W2 Employee

  • Billions of dollars in funding available
  • Funds are available to U.S. Businesses NOW
  • This is not a loan. These tax credits do not need to be repaid
The ERC Program is currently open, but has been amended in the past. We recommend you claim yours before anything changes.

On a seasonally adjusted basis, there were 183,000 new homes for sale at the end of March, representing a 7.3-month supply at the current sales rate.

Data released last week showed that existing-home sales rose 3.7% in March to a slightly better-than-expected seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.1 million units, according to the National Association of Realtors.

March’s rate of home resales remained 6.3% below year-earlier levels, and 24.8% below the cyclical peak of 6.49 million units in Nov. 2009, which was the first month following the initial deadline for the first-time homebuyer tax credit.

The SPDR S&P Homebuilders (XHB), an exchange-traded fund that tracks the homebuilder sector, remains around 60% off its peak of $46.08 in early 2006. The iShares Dow Jones U.S. Home Construction (ITB) ETF remains more than 70% off its peak of $50.10 in the spring of 2006.

Stocks in the homebuilder sector were mixed Monday morning.

Among individual builders, D.R. Horton (DHI) gained 0.5%, Toll Brothers (TOL) declined 0.4% and Lennar (LEN) lost 0.1%.

PulteGroup (PHM), recently added to Goldman Sachs’ (GS) conviction buy list, shed 0.5%.

Small-cap builder KB Home (KBH) was lower by 0.4%.

This article was republished with permission from The Street.

advertisement

Does Your Small Business Qualify?

Claim Up to $26K Per Employee

Don't Wait. Program Expires Soon.

Click Here

Share This:

In this article