Wonder why construction jobs are hard to find? Nobody's buying new houses.
What few construction jobs survived the recession have resulted in newly built homes that can't find buyers.
This graph of sales for newly constructed single-family homes shows data from 1989 to August, 2010. The blue line shows the numbers of new homes sold, by month. The pink region shows the percent change from the previous year. The spike in early 2010 shows response to the federal housing stimulus, but the continued decline in its wake leads some to question its long-term effectiveness.
SoldAtTheTop
Today, the U.S. Census Department released its monthly New Residential Home Sales Report for August showing continued stunning weakness with sales remaining flat at an all-time low of 288K annualized units, the lowest level on record.
New single family home sales stayed flat since July and plunged a whopping 28.9% below the level seen in August 2009 while the monthly supply declined slightly to 8.6 months and the median months for sale declined to 10.3 months.
These results provide even more evidence that the government's housing tax scam policy was ultimately a complete and total failure accomplishing nothing but creating a temporary distortion of the underlying "organic" housing trends.
With numbers this weak, it could even be argued that the government's tax gimmick ultimately destabilized the nation's home markets by injecting a substantial amount of uncertainty, sponsoring feeble home buyers and preventing the natural market clearing mechanism from playing out.
The following charts show the extent of sales decline (click for full-larger version)
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