With the market for existing homes struggling amid a lack of inventory, New Home Sales continue doing the heavy lifting for the housing market.  Rather, New Home Sales are doing more to show a stronger relative performance to the pre-pandemic years.  The market for existing homes is still far bigger, even at its weakest levels.

But existing home sales data is so "last week."  Today's release is specific to new homes, so let's zoom in.  When we do, we can see new home sales remaining in the 2017-2019 range for nearly two years now.  

In other words, new residential sales continue chugging along without much fanfare since the initial supply glut and demand surge that followed covid-related lockdowns. 

There was quite a bit of variation depending on geography, which is often a result of ebbs and flows of weather events at this time of year.  Here's how the chips fell in January by region:

• The Western region saw a huge 38.7% increase, moving from the lowest levels in 10 months to the highest levels in more than a year
• The Northeast saw and even larger 72% increase, but that's not saying as much given the vastly smaller unit count in that region
• The Midwest ticked up 7.7% month over month but remained well under July's peak
• The South decreased by 15.6%  to the lowest levels in more than a year, but only slightly below November