WREN Report: Retail Sales Down in September

November 16, 2008  by in UnCategorized   

By Home Furnishings Business in on November 2008 • Furniture store sales plummeted in September according to the U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC). On an annualized basis, sales for the month were $55.3 billion, down 10.8 percent from August. Measured against September 2007, sales in furniture stores were down 11.2 percent.

Sales in home furnishings stores, which exclude furniture store sales, were $47.9 billion in September, a decline of 6.7 percent from August. Compared with September of last year, home furnishings store sales fell 8.3 percent.

Year-to-date sales in both stores are off from the comparable 2007 period. For the first nine months of 2008, furniture store sales were $44.5 billion, down 5.1 percent from last year. Home furnishings store sales declined 7.6 percent to $37 billion for the first three-quarters of the year.

DOC also announced advance estimates for overall retail and food services sales for October, adjusted for seasonal variation and holiday and trading-day differences, were $363.7 billion, a decrease of 2.8 percent from September and 4.1 percent below October 2007. On an annualized basis, sales were $4.36 trillion.

The DOC advance estimate for combined furniture and home furnishings store sales for the first 10 months of 2008 is $90 billion, down 7 percent from the comparable 2007 period.

• Home values fell for the seventh quarter in a row, according to real estate Web site Zillow.com . According to Zillow.com, home values declined 9.7 percent year-over-year in the third quarter to a Zillow Home Value Index of $202,966, based on 163 metropolitan areas.

Home values have dropped a total 12.8 percent since the market peaked in 2006, according to Zillow.

“It’s clear we are at a unique point in history; we’ve had seven consecutive quarters of decline, and we expect that to continue until at least the middle of next year,” said Stan Humphries, Zillow vice president of data and analytics.

Weekly Review of Economic News (WREN) reports are summaries of recently-released economic statistical data that affect the home furnishings industry. WREN reports are compiled by HFB Research Editor Janice Chamberlain.