Are newly built homes selling?

Perfect storm. Interest rates remain high, prices inflated.

The Wall St Journal this morning:

America’s biggest builders are struggling to sell homes even when they offer buyers a 4% mortgage. Their experience suggests rate cuts alone won’t be enough to boost weak sales in the wider housing market.

The number of completed but unsold new homes has reached levels last seen in the summer of 2009, data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis shows. At the end of last year, builders were confident that sales would recover in 2025 and built tens of thousands of units to have enough supply for the spring-buying season. But demand didn’t pick up, and more homes sat unsold.

They have tried to use sweeteners to shift inventory. D.R. Horton DHI -0.22%decrease; red down pointing triangle, which builds roughly one in every seven new homes in the U.S. and has its own financing arm, is offering 3.99% mortgages to buyers. The company has also knocked 3% off its average selling price over the past 12 months and expects to cut prices further in its 2026 fiscal year, which runs through September.

America’s second-largest builder, Lennar LEN -0.39%decrease; red down pointing triangle, said it offered buyers incentives worth $64,000 on its average home sale last quarter to meet its sales target. A combination of subsidized mortgages and price cuts on offer from Lennar was equivalent to a 14.3% price reduction. The last time it had to offer home buyers such a deep discount was during the global financial crisis.