U.S. Real Estate Right on Track with New Record Gains

The U.S. housing market is back on track due to a surge in single-family home sales, several media reports said.

Citing data from the Commerce Department, Tulsa World and The New York Times reported that new home sales soared 18 percent in August to a seasonally adjusted yearly rate of 504,000 units.

This represents a second monthly increase since the June slowdown and puts last month’s sales at its “highest level since May 2008,” Tulsa World said.

Over the past 12 months, sales of new homes have increased by 33 percent. Meanwhile, median prices for new homes reached $275,600, up by almost 8 percent from last year. 

The report attributed the sales hike due to closed transactions in the West, which rose by 50 percent in August compared with July’s figures, and in the Northeast, which saw a 29.2 percent rise in home sales.  

As demand rose along with increased sales last month, new home inventories also soared to its highest level in four years. This means more options for home buyers, the New York Times report noted.

August inventories were worth 4.8 months down from 5.6 months in July. The normal range is six months, it noted.

July sales were revised to 427,000, a few transactions up from 412,000.

New home sales sharply declined in June and May, reflecting the sector’s largest loss since July 2013, Reuters reported. Using data from the Commerce Department, Reuters said new home sales dipped by 8.1 percent to a seasonally adjusted rate of 406,000 units.  Sales in May were readjusted to reflect a rate of 442,000 unit.

Sales were down in all four region, although the Northeast saw the sharpest decline at 20 percent.

New home sales account for 7.5 percent of the U.S. real estate market, Reuters noted.

The rebound in home sales is definitely welcome news to real estate agents and brokers across the country. Now that demand is slowly climbing up again, realtors have less to worry about as most of them aim to reach year-end or monthly quotas. 

Real estate agents can take advantage of the uptrend by using disruptive technologies created by Realbiz Media Group, Inc. RBIZ to increase their sales.

Realbiz Media is a Florida-based digital media company that develops proprietary video marketing software that agents and their brokers can use to promote their virtual tour listings online.

Its Virtual Tour Program allows real estate sellers to create virtual tours and presentations that are optimized for mobile viewing and could be syndicated through social media for only $29.95 a month.

The program features a video search engine optimization (VSEO) tool that automatically generate meta tags and descriptions for virtual tours and listings that agents have uploaded to the platform so that they would be found easily by consumers online.

The program also has tools for creating QR codes, e-flyers, and seller reports as bonus features.

Realbiz Media’s platforms, applications and web sites feature social integration, which allow agents to cross-publish their posts to social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest.

To learn more about Realbiz Media and its products, contact sales@realbizmediagroup.com or call 1.888.REAL.BIZ (888.732.5249).