Housing Market

A hawkish Jackson Hole debut, sticky PCE inflation, a 10.5% drop in new home sales and the end of RE/MAX as an independent company — the week’s biggest real estate stories in one place.

Construction spending Tuesday, Freddie Mac’s rate survey Thursday and the August jobs report Friday — the last full data week before the Fed’s September meeting.

New single-family home sales fell to a 607,000 annual rate in July, but only the Midwest’s 42.7% collapse and a rise in unsold inventory clear the Census Bureau’s statistical significance test.

S&P Cotality Case-Shiller and FHFA both showed home prices accelerating modestly in June, but housing lost ground to inflation for a 13th straight month and the Midwest-West gap kept widening.

Closed sales dropped to roughly 11,700 from 13,000 in June, and the statewide median slipped to $330,000 — though prices remain 4.7% above a year ago and listings are still tighter than last summer.

The governor gave the Texas Department of Insurance until Sept. 14 to recommend further changes, and ordered five immediate actions including a ban on price optimization and a prohibition on non-renewals based on a home’s age.

Builders who started five or fewer homes last year reported a 9.1% median increase in material costs, while builders with 100 or more starts reported 1.8% — a gap that helps explain why consolidation keeps accelerating.

Median listing prices fell 2.4% year over year in July as sellers priced more realistically from the start, cutting delistings and pushing contract signings to their highest level since 2022.

Massachusetts House and Senate bills tackle zoning reform through different routes — YIGBY on religious land versus statewide duplexes-by-right — after rent stabilization was knocked off the table by the courts.

Single-family starts plunged, mortgage rates eased for a second week, the $876 million commission settlements survived appeal, and Real and RE/MAX cleared the way for a Monday closing.

The FTC’s antitrust trial against Zillow and Redfin opens Monday alongside the Real-RE/MAX closing, Case-Shiller and new-home sales land Tuesday, and the Fed’s Jackson Hole symposium convenes Thursday.

Single-family attached starts totaled 42,000 in the second quarter, down 9% year over year, pulling townhouse market share off its 2025 record high while staying well above historical norms.

Home discounts peak in late August across much of California, Austin and New York suburbs, and in September across Texas, Houston, Las Vegas and Washington, D.C., a Redfin analysis found.

About 15,000 single-family built-for-rent units started construction in the second quarter, down from 18,000 a year earlier, with the four-quarter average off 16% as financing costs bite.

Fourteen percent of U.S. home-purchase agreements fell through in July, the highest share since November 2023, as a record-low buyer count and 51% more sellers than buyers shifted negotiating power.

A typical family needed 34% of its income to cover the mortgage on a median-priced new home in the second quarter, up from 32% in the first, as higher mortgage rates and rising costs reversed three straight quarters of improving affordability, according to the NAHB/Wells Fargo Cost of Housing Index.

New listings of U.S. homes rose 5.8% from a year earlier to their highest level in more than three months in the four weeks ending Aug. 16, even as pending sales slid to their lowest level since March, according to Redfin.

Hovnanian Enterprises reported fiscal third-quarter revenue of $705.7 million, down 12% from a year earlier, and a net loss of $4.5 million, as thinner margins and a cooler market weighed on the national homebuilder.

California voters will decide in November whether the state should borrow $11.25 billion to attack its affordable housing shortage, after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation putting the measure on the ballot as Proposition 1. The bond, created through Senate Bill 417 and formally titled the Veterans and Affordable Housing Bond Act of 2026, would be … Read more

Toll Brothers shares climbed after the luxury homebuilder posted fiscal third-quarter results that topped Wall Street estimates on both the top and bottom lines, even as profit and deliveries fell from a year earlier in what the company’s new chief executive called “a challenging market.” The Horsham, Pennsylvania-based builder reported diluted earnings per share of … Read more

The National Association of Insurance Commissioners on Aug. 5 released its first nationwide analysis of homeowners insurance market trends, and the numbers confirm what agents and buyers in wildfire- and storm-prone states have been reporting for years: coverage is getting more expensive and harder to keep, at a pace that is now reshaping the cost … Read more