Contracts to buy U.S. previously owned homes increased for a third straight month in February. On Wednesday, the National Association of Realtors said its Pending Home Sales Index, which measures signed contracts, rose 0.8% last month to the highest level since August. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast contracts, which become sales after a month or two, would fall 2.3%.
Back on February 16, I gave you a list of 12 stocks I’d sell into the rally after the February 1 meeting of the Federal Reserve. (Here’s the link https://jubakam.com/wednesdays-rally…re-the-12-stocks/). Yesterday in the first step of my Special Report: 5 Steps for the Next 5 Months” I promised another set of sell recommendations before Friday’s jobs report for February, the March 14 CPI inflation report, and the March 22 meeting of the Fed’s interest rate setting group, the Open Market Committee. Here’s that list of another 12 stocks to sell.
In the four weeks through February 26, the median price for a typical home was $350,246, down 0.6% from the same period a year earlier, according to Redfin. That’s the first year-over-year drop since 2012.
The U.S. supply of new homes relative to sales in June was the highest since the middle of the last crash in 2010. In early July, buyer traffic to homebuilder websites and sales offices had plunged to the lowest level for the month since 2012, according to a survey of builder sentiment from the National Association of Home Builders. Here’s the problem: a pandemic housing boom led builders to start construction because the market had too little inventory. In June, 824,000 single-family homes were under construction in the United States, more than at any time since October 2006, according to an NAHB analysis. Now those home builders are having trouble selling those homes
DR Horton led home building stocks higher, rising 5.43% as of 1 p.m. New York time, after showing a 31% jump in net income in earnings reported this morning before the market opened. The company also guided Wall Street to expect a strong selling season this spring.
Because the Federal Reserve has used low interest rates to drive a recovery in the housing sector in order to ignite the rest of the economy, the drop in forecast gross margins at homebuilder DR Horton caught my eye yesterday
