Utah New Homes Sales Surge In Salt Lake!

New Home Sales Surge

If you only saw the headlines this week, you may have missed another real positive sign in the Utah housing market.

According to the Census Bureau, the supply of newly-built homes for sale fell to 10.2 months in May, its lowest level in 10 months.

Unfortunately, the New Homes Sales story wasn't positioned as a positively by the press. Instead, the most common headline on the data read "New Home Sales Dip 0.6%" with many journalists referring to the figures as "weak" or "disappointing".

Only, that's not completely true. Utah New Home sales have just about exhausted the $6,000 New Home Grant, with the majority of sales being New Homes for Sale in the Salt Lake area.

See, one of the nice elements of the monthly New Home Sales report is its footnote section in which the Census Bureau talks about statistical Margin of Error and that section tells us that if the Margin of Error is larger than the measurement itself, the report is useless.

And that's exactly what happened in May.

New Home Sales were measured to have fallen by 0.6 percent but that data point was dwarfed by its 17.8 percent Margin of Error, The "headline data", in other words, was just a guess.

It's not a guess though to Salt Lake home buyers looking to combine the Utah New Home Incentive with the Federal $8,000 First Time Home Buyer Tax Credit.

The fact is, the Utah grant that created funds for homebuyers purchasing newly constructed homes has lived up to its name, "home run". In a period of about 2 months the roughly 1600 housing grants were used to buy new homes in Utah, Most of them in areas surrounding Salt Lake City.

These first time home and condominium buyers are seeing a lot of construction taking place in areas of Suncrest in Herriman, Daybreak in South Jordan, and a variety of New Condominiums in Downtown Salt Lake City.

The press reported it anyway.

Nonetheless, as it relates to the economy, falling home inventories are a positive. Having 10-plus months of homes on the market is still high historically, but a definite improvement over what we saw earlier this year.

So long as low mortgage rates and aggressive pricing persists from builders, we expect even less supply in the months ahead.

To keep track of all of the Salt Lake Homes for Sale stop by SLC Home Listings and access the many homes available in the Salt Lake Valley.

Published Friday, June 26, 2009 11:32 AM by Corie Seymour