Census and HUD released July new residential sales on Aug. 25. The number that matters isn’t the headline decline. It’s 9.6.
The figures
New single-family home sales ran at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 607,000, down from June’s 678,000 and below July 2025’s 648,000. Inventory went the other way: 488,000 new houses for sale at month end, up 1.9% from June’s 479,000 and 1.6% below a year earlier.
Falling sales against rising inventory pushed months’ supply to 9.6, up from June’s 8.5 and above July 2025’s 9.2.
Pricing split in a way that’s worth reading twice. The median sales price fell to $393,800, down 2.3% from June and down 0.9% year over year. The average price rose to $508,800, up 4.1% from June and up 5.4% year over year.
Read the confidence interval before you quote the percentage
Census reports the 10.5% monthly decline at plus or minus 14.0%. The agency cannot say with statistical confidence that sales fell at all last month. Anyone building a forecast on the month-over-month change is building on noise.
The levels are the reliable part. A 607,000 annual rate and 9.6 months of supply are estimates too, but they move slowly enough to act on. The percentage change does not.
What 9.6 months does to construction
Builders don’t break ground into a nine-month overhang. Months’ supply is the number that governs single-family starts, land acquisition and spec-build decisions for the next two quarters, and it explains the price cutting already visible in builder sentiment data. Residential trade contractors in the Sun Belt, where spec inventory is concentrated, should expect backlog pressure to follow.
The median-versus-average divergence says where the weakness sits. When the median falls and the average rises, the low end of the market is where transactions are disappearing. Builders are still moving move-up product; entry-level volume is stalling. That’s a mix problem, not a broad price collapse, and it points at affordability and financing rather than demand for housing generally.
It also explains why conversion is drawing capital in markets where new supply is hard. The 1740 Broadway office-to-residential conversion in Manhattan is adding 420 homes to a market that can’t easily build them, on a $480 million construction loan, and it works largely because the building traded at a distressed basis.
The next release is Sept. 24.