March 24, 2011
In his blog today, Floyd Norris notes an unprecedented divergence between the trends in existing home sales and new home sales. He points out that existing home sales have held up reasonably well, while new home sales are down by more than 75 percent from their bubble peak.
While this is largely true (Core Logic and real estate analyst Keith Jurow have noted an upward bias in the realtors’ data on existing home sales) this gap is also entirely predictable given the rise and fall of the housing bubble. New homes are the mechanism that adjusts supply and demand. When prices went through the roof during the run-up of the bubble, builders rushed to build new homes so that they could profit from the extraordinarily high prices. As a result, we had near record rates of new construction from 2002-2006.
However, once the bubble burst and prices began to tumble, there was little reason to build new homes. A large supply of homes for sale and falling prices makes building new homes an unprofitable venture. The price that builders can expect to receive is on average more than 30 percent less than it was at the peak of the bubble and they are likely to have to wait a long period of time before they can even make a sale.
For this reason, it should not be surprising that new home sales have fallen by much more than existing home sales following the collapse of the bubble. They will presumably rise back to a more normal level in the next two or three years, which is likely to mean at least a 100 percent increase from the February level. At that point, we will again be building homes fast enough to replace worn out structures and to meet the needs of a growing population.
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