It is not usually a very productive endeavor to write an article on December 22nd. In the past, I have made it more or less a rule not to post anything after about the middle of the month, unless it was a greatest-hits repost series or something. However, today’s Existing Home Sales number was striking enough that it is worth at least a brief comment.
November Existing Home Sales was reported at 4.76mm units (seasonally-adjusted annualized rate), which was considerably below expectations for a nearly-unchanged 5.35mm. The chart (Source: Bloomberg) below makes graphically clear the magnitude of this disappointment.
Recently, sales of existing homes had been back to something like normal, around 5.5mm units at an annualized rate. The big selloff will cause consternation in some quarters. It wasn’t the weather: November’s weather was, if anything, warmer than usual and so one wouldn’t have thought foot traffic and closings would have been slower. And it wasn’t payback, like in 2010 when the collapse followed the tax-incentive-expiration-induced spike of 2009. We can’t really even shrug it off as “December economic data;†I am always skeptical of economic figures from December and January because it’s just a mess to seasonally adjust most of them – especially those related to employment and income. But this was a November figure.
It was just a really bad number.
The potential significance is this: so far, analysts pointing to weakness in economic data have had to be careful about drawing too-strong conclusions because a lot of the weakness was confined to the oil and gas extraction industries, and spots of weakness in traditional manufacturing where a higher dollar hurt. Housing, however, is wholly domestic. It doesn’t depend on oil and gas extraction, and the strength of the dollar is irrelevant.
Housing data are also notoriously volatile, although that complaint is less true of Existing Home Sales than New Home Sales (which is a much smaller figure, and depends much more on what inventory of homes is being offered). I would simply ignore this figure if it was New Home Sales. It’s harder to shrug off Existing.
