New home sales are at an 8-month high but still stuck after 10 years

New home sales rose on Thursday to an 8-month high, and the sales channel we’ve had since the 2022 crash has largely held up. That means, if you remove the COVID-era surge in new home sales, we have been stuck for 10 years. To give you some perspective, new home sales are still trending at 2019 levels, which would amount to over 1 million more existing home sales if that data were trending at 2019 levels. Why is this still the case? Simple answer: the new-home sales marketplace is working from a sub-6% marketplace, whereas the existing-home sales market can’t. Lets take a look at the report today. New home sales Sales of new single-family houses in August 2026 were at a seasonally-adjusted annual rate of 684,000, according to estimates released jointly today by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. This is 6.4% (±19.5%)* above the July 2026 rate of 643,000, and is 2.0% (±15.7%)* below the August 2025 rate of 698,000. As the chart below shows, we’ve simply gone back and forth for years, running at 2019 levels. For years, builders have been able to offset higher borrowing costs by offering mortgage-rate buydowns. The question now is whether, as r...