New Home Sales Higher in January, Yet Supply Concerns Remain
Strong demand stemming from low interest rates, favorable demographics and a suburban shift for home building to smaller, more affordable housing markets helped to lift new home sales in January, but rising lumber and material costs threaten to blunt this momentum.
Sales of newly built, single-family homes in January rose 4.3 percent to a 923,000 seasonally adjusted annual rate, from an upwardly revised December reading, according to newly released data by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the U.S. Census Bureau.