by Wolf Richter
Wolf Street
Bottom falls out at lower end. Fed-enriched high-end buyers doing fine.
The concept of selling overpriced new houses to everyone is running into trouble. Sales of new single-family houses in June plunged by 6.6% from May, and by 32% from the peak in January, to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 676,000 houses, the lowest June since 2018, according to the Census Bureau this morning. This multi-month plunge brought house sales back to pre-pandemic levels. And given the construction boom in apartments and condos in urban centers over the past decade, single-family house sales remain a fraction of the boom in 2002 through 2007: