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Friday, October 24, 2014

The Housing Recovery Has Been Canceled Due To Data Revisions

Last month, when, with great amusement, we reported that "New Home Sales Explode Higher Thanks To... Record High Average New Home Prices?", we mocked the latest batch of bullshit data released by the US department of truth as follows:

New Home Sales rose a magnificent (seasonally-adjusted annualized rate) 18% in August - the biggest monthly rise since January 1992 albeit with a 16.3 90% confidence interval, meaning the final number may well be +1.7%. At 504k, new home sales are back at May 2008 levels (though obviously massively below the 1.4 million homes sold at the peak in 2005). As a reminder, May's 504K new home sales print was later revised later to 458K. But even more stunning, new home sales in The West rose a mind-numbing 50% in August (and up 84.4% YoY - nearly double).

Well, it is now a month later, and here come the revisions: first, that 50% surge in the West was revised... 30K lower. But to get a sense of just how bad the revision was, here is the old, pre-revision data, and the "data" following the latest revision.

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