Exactly how many new houses costing $750,000 or more were sold in the United States last month?
Only the government knows, and it won’t tell, other than to say it’s below 500. But as low as the number is, it isn’t zero — contrary to a commentary posted Thursday by Gluskin Sheff economist David Rosenberg and picked up on some popular blogs.
Rosenberg, who has presciently called for investors to buy bonds this year while predicting a stock market crash that hasn’t come to pass, turned his attention Thursday to the distressed U.S. housing market. He zeroed in, pardon the pun, on the tumbling sales of the most expensive houses.
The high-end market, in particular, is under tremendous pressure. In fact, it is becoming non-existent. Guess how many homes prices above $750k managed to sell in July. Answer — zero, nada, rien; and for the second month in a row.
Rosenberg is right that sales of high-end new houses have plunged. In 2006, at the height of the housing boom, 43,000 expensive new houses sold, government data show.
Since then, the numbers have fallen steadily, to 32,000 in 2007, 18,000 in 2008 and 10,000 last year. The number in the first half of 2010 was 6,000.
But as bad as things may have gotten, there’s no reason to think the number fell to zero in the last two months. Rosenberg evidently misread the data on the tables issued Wednesday by the Census Bureau and the Commerce Department, which tally monthly sales in various categories by the thousand.
When the number of sales in a given category falls below 499 – the level at which it would be rounded down to zero on a table measuring thousand-sale units – it is denoted by the symbol (Z).
Rosenberg seems to have seen a (Z) in the $750,000 and up category for the second straight month and concluded, wrongly, that it meant no houses were sold. Gluskin Sheff didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
So what was the actual sales number? The government won’t tell, spokesman Stephen Cooper says, because of privacy concerns. He says the government can’t disclose information beyond what’s published on fears that data “might be used to identify a particular home.”
That doesn’t make it sound like a lot of houses were sold, though there’s no point speculating. Let’s just say July sales of expensive new houses weren’t quite zero.