• July new home sales fell 1.7 percent from June, to 627,000 (SAAR), but rose 12.8 percent from a year ago, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Preliminary sales figures from the past three months were revised downward by a collective 13,000 sales.
• The decline was largely driven by sales weakness in the South. Sales were up in the West.
• The median (non-seasonally adjusted) price of new homes sold last month rose 1.8 percent from a year ago, to $328,700.
• Inventory rose 2 percent from June and 12 percent from a year ago, to 309,000 new homes for sale.

For the second month in a row, both new and existing home sales have come in below expectations, adding yet another data point to the mounting body of evidence pointing to a struggling housing market. After a big jump in the latter half of 2017, new home sales stagnated during the first half of 2018. Similar to existing home sales that have seemingly reached a plateau around 5.5 million annual sales, new home sales have been bouncing around near 650,000 sales for several months. And permits have been trending downward for some time. The only housing market indicator that has moved decisively higher in 2018 has been prices: Everything else is flat. Whatever progress has been made in new home sales since the economic recovery began, recent data makes it clear that builders have been struggling to ramp up new single-family home construction for years. If building levels had largely stayed near their historic norms and had kept pace with population growth, there would be millions more single-family homes nationwide, and the current imbalance between housing supply and housing demand would not be nearly pronounced. A few months of incremental gains or losses will not meaningfully change that difficult fact.