While July new home data is looking pretty dismal, we’ve been picking out some trends developing that could suggest which segments of the market we should be focused on for signs of an eventual recovery.  Our data feature this week, courtesy of Housing IntelligencePro, segments new home sales by price range, and we went back to 2005 to see at what point along the cycle each category peaked.   An interesting but not entirely surprising trend emerged, with the low end peaking first in June 2005, while volume in the top category didn’t peak until over 2 years later in August 2007, well after the housing downturn had already begun.

No matter how you look at it, there was really nothing positive about the national data releases covering July new and existing home sales figures released earlier this week.  But as the county-level data starts to roll in to our data platform, Housing IntelligencePro, we have been able to single out a few of the early reporting areas that managed to post gains in new home closings in July, and so we thought we’d feature them for our readers this week.

While the new home market remains down from a year ago in terms of sales activity, some of the large public builders have managed to improve on their pace of sales.  Our data feature this week ranks the public builders in terms of the percentage change in closings for the first six months of 2010 versus the first six months of 2009, courtesy of Housing IntelligencePro.  Richmond American (MDC) tops the list, closing 15% more homes than they did in the first half of 2009, followed by DR Horton with +7% and MI Homes at +6%.
 

You may have seen a recent headline on high end home sales performing well this year, with the suggestion by our friends at the National Association of Realtors that it is primarily due to low jumbo mortgage rates.  While low mortgage rates have definitely improved the affordability scenario, that trend has been across the board of all price categories, so in our data feature this week we decided to take a closer look at what else could contribute to the sales of high end homes in particular, including new construction, courtesy of Housing IntelligencePro.

A builder ranking by price per square foot makes up our data feature this week, looking at which home builders have the highest average price per square foot on new closings so far in 2010.  Leading the list is Toll Brothers, reflecting their up-market product offerings, followed by Brookfield Homes and the builder of the active adult mecca The Villages in Florida.  Of note, the prevalence of highly ranking builders on the list who are known for catering to retirees reflects the typically larger asset holdings and savings of that demographic group.