New-home purchases account for about 10% of the market and are calculated when contracts are signed. They are considered a timely barometer of the current real estate market.
At a very unusual time of year, not when folks normally want to be preparing to move, sales of new single-family houses in the US for January 2021 were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 923,000.
This is +4.3% above the revised December rate of 885,000 and is +19.3% above the January 2020 estimate of 774,000.
There were 307,000 new homes on the market last month, up from 299,000 in December.
Softwood lumber prices jumped by a historic +73% on a year-on-year basis in January 2021.