A Healthy Housing Industry Emerging: New Home Sales and Existing Home Sales
June 30,
2017 by HFBusiness Staff in General 
This is the first factoid in a series of four factoids detailing the continued growth of the post-recession Housing Industry. After years of fighting back from the housing bubble pop, the Housing Industry is finally on the mend and appears to be getting healthier by the year. Although still shy of 2007 pre-recession levels, housing appears to be catching up fast despite a couple of stumbles last year.
The rate of growth slowed for existing home sales last year but unit sales approached pre-recession levels. Meanwhile, new home sales, while still well below pre-recession numbers, are catching up to pent up demand as housing construction steadily increases its new single family homebuilding.
Indexed growth for existing home sales in 2016 was only 3.6 percentage points shy of peak 2007 pre-recession sales. In 2016, 5.49 million existing homes were sold compared to 5.65 million in 2007. For new homes, the 559,000 units sold in 2016 were still 27.8 percent below the 769,000 sold in 2007. However, as construction has played catch-up to demand, new home sales have grown 82.7 percent since the recession bottom of 2011.
New home sales had a solid performance in 2016 – increasing 11.3 percent from 2015. However, sales are off to a slow start with January sales flat on a seasonally annualized basis.
Despite dipping in 2014, existing home sales have grown steadily in recent years – up 3.8 percent from 2015 to 2016 and another 4.4% jump into January of this year. The next factoid in this series will focus on Existing Home Sales by Region.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Annual Rate for New Single-Family Houses Sold, National Association of Realtors
*based on houses sold in January 2017