Good News for Builders: New Home Inventory Down Again in September
A report in the Oct. 30 Eye on the Economy e-mail newsletter published by the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), Washington, D.C., said new home inventory in Sept. 2009 was down by more than half to 251,000, the lowest level since November 1982. New home inventories peaked at 572,000 in July 2006. There was a 7.5 months' supply of unsold homes in September, down from an all-time of 12.4 months in January of this year. The inventory has declined by almost 100,000 additional units from the 340,000 new homes on the market in the first month of the year, which in healthier times would have been a near-normal level. NAHB said the fact that the months' supply was running at a somewhat elevated level in September when the inventory was below normal levels clearly indicates that the major problem facing the housing market is no longer oversupply, but weak demand.
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Jim Lucy Blog
Chief Editor
Jim Lucy has been wandering through the electrical market for more than 30 years, most of the time as an editor for Electrical Wholesaling, Electrical Marketing newsletter and CEE News. During that time he and the editorial team for the publications have won numerous national awards for their coverage of the electrical business. He showed an early interest in electricity, when as a youth he had an idea for a hot dog cooker. Unfortunately, the first crude prototype malfunctioned and the arc nearly blew him out of his parents' basement. Before becoming an editor for Electrical Wholesaling magazine and Electrical Marketing, he earned a BA degree in journalism and a MA in communications from Glassboro State College, Glassboro, NJ., which is formerly best known as the site of the 1967 summit meeting between President Lyndon Johnson and Russian Premier Aleksei Nikolayevich Kosygin, and now best known as the New Jersey state college that changed its name in 1992 to Rowan University because of a generous $100 million donation by N.J. zillionaire industrialist Henry Rowan. Jim is a Brooklyn-born Jersey Guy happily transplanted in the fertile plains of Kansas for the past 20 years.