With all the housing drama lately going on, one truth has stayed constant for years: new home sales are holding up due to rate buy-downs, but housing permits are still at recession levels! What gives here? First and foremost, new home sales have outperformed the existing home sales market for many years now, and they are still at 2019 levels, which would mean 1 to 1.3 million more existing home sales if we did an apples-to-apples comparison. However, housing permits have been in a recession for a while and are not showing any real growth prospects, as we can see in the chart below.
I discussed this on this episode of the HousingWire Daily podcast and today I’ll show the key data line that explains why this is the case.
From Census: New Home Sales: Sales of new single-family houses in December 2025 were at a seasonally-adjusted annual rate of 745,000, according to estimates released jointly today by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. This is 1.7 percent (±14.5 percent)* below the November 2025 rate of 758,000, and is 3.8 percent (±18.3 percent)* above the December 2024 rate of 718,000.
Mortgage rates are near 6%, which means it costs builders less to do a buy-down, and because they sell homes as a commodity, they’re trying their best to manage this cycle and their profit margins. This means selling a new home in recent years has been more of a calculation on how much builder credit they can and need to give. With that said, if you take the COVID-19 spike in sales away and the lows in 2022, new home sales have been stuck in a range for 10 years.
For Sale Inventory and Months’ Supply: The seasonally-adjusted estimate of new houses for sale at the end of December 2025 was 472,000. This is 2.7 percent (±1.3 percent) below the November 2025 estimate of 485,000, and is 3.5 percent (±4.8 percent)* below the December 2024 estimate of 489,000. This represents a supply of 7.6 months at the current sales rate. The months’ supply is 1.3 percent (±12.2 percent)* below the November 2025 estimate of 7.7 months, and is 7.3 percent (±15.0 percent)* below the December 2024 estimate of 8.2 months.
Looking at the charts below, it does seem like there has been some progress on inventory and monthly supply.
So, why did the builder confidence sour just a tad this week?
The builders’ truth
As I have always stated, the builders aren’t the March of Dimes, and they don’t like to see completed units for sale over 120,000. History has shown that when this data line gets over 120,000, the builders don’t really push the pedal to the metal on housing construction.
Conclusion
So the new home sales and housing starts this week have told us the same story we have been watching for years, not much is going on either side: new home sales aren’t crashing, nor are they breaking out. For total units completed to decline significantly, we will need more new-home sales growth. Housing permits haven’t gotten worse recently, but we aren’t really growing much either. This is the way the world works with this sector of housing, don’t make it complicated.