Sales of new dwellings rose in November south of the border and have posted solid growth for the year as a whole, though the recent jump in mortgage rates could restrain home buying activity headed into 2017.
Figures released Friday by the U.S. Commerce Department show purchases of newly built single-family houses, which account for a small share of overall U.S. home sales, increased 5.2% from October to a seasonally-adjusted annual rate of 592,000 last month, the largest one-month gain and the highest level for sales since July.
Economists expected a smaller November gain to a sales rate of 580,000. October’s sales pace was left unrevised at 563,000.
Data on new-home sales can be extremely volatile from month to month. November’s 5.2% sales increase came with a margin of error of 14.1 percentage points.
More broadly, 2016 has seen decent growth in the market for new single-family homes. The department says sales in the first 11 months of the year were up 12.7% compared with the same period in 2015.
At the current sales pace, it would take 5.1 months to exhaust the supply of newly built homes on the market at the end of November. The median sale price last month was $305,400 U.S, down from $317,000 U.S. in November 2015.
