According to the US Census Bureau, New Home Sales of new single-family houses in July 2025 were at a seasonally-adjusted annual rate of 652,000, according to estimates released jointly today by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. This is 0.6 percent (±15.5 percent)* below the June 2025 rate of 656,000, and is 8.2 percent (±14.0 percent)* below the July 2024 rate of 710,000.
Median and Average Sales Price
The median sales price of new houses sold in July 2025 was $403,800. This is 0.8 percent (±5.9 percent)* below the June 2025 price of $407,200, and is 5.9 percent (±8.5 percent)* below the July 2024 price of $429,000. The average sales price of new houses sold in July 2025 was $487,300. This is 3.6 percent (±8.0 percent)* below the June 2025 price of $505,300, and is 5.0 percent (±8.6 percent)* below the July 2024 price of $513,200.
Here is a chart of median sales price of new homes against Fed money printing (M2).
US existing home sales dropped 0.5% MoM in April (considerably worse than the +2.0% MoM rise expected), dropping to just 4.00MM sales SAAR, with sales down 3.1% from a year earlier on an unadjusted basis.
This is the weakest April sales pace since April 2009.
And median price of EHS is rising and is on pace to top 2024’s high.
And with M2 Money printing like a bat out of hell.
Despite the slump in ‘soft’ survey data, analysts expected Empire Fed Manufacturing to bounce back from March’s tumble to one year lows and they were right with the headline index rising from -20.0 to -8.1 (considerably better than the -13.5), but still negative. However, while current conditions jumped, expectations plunged to the lowest since 9/11/.
The US got hit with 2 deadly viruses in 2020. First, Covid-19 struck then another deadly virus struck in late 2020 with the election of DEI-obsessed Joe Biden, the worst President in history.
With rising interest rates and housing prices under “Clueless Joe,” buying conditions for housing plunged from around 160 under Trump to an abysmal 30 under Biden. And now Trump.
Janet Yelllen, the former Federal Reserve Chair and Treasury Secretary under clueless Joe Biden was a disaster in every respect. As Fed Chair, she was noteworthy for her clinging to low rates for too long. And as Treasury Secretary, she is noteworthy for her gross fiscal mismanagement (look at the deficit and debt crisis!). Now Zero Hedge has this disastrous report of $4.7 TRILLION in virtuallly untraceable Treasury payments.
The Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on Monday revealed its finding that $4.7 trillion in disbursements by the US Treasury are “almost impossible” to trace, thanks to a rampant disregard for the basic accounting practice of using of tracking codes when dishing out money.
With a debt load of $36.5 trillion and D.O.G.E. clock at $109 million and growing. Not to mention the $227 trillion in unfunded liabilities.
Mind you, it’s not as if such a federal tracking system wasn’t already in place— it simply went casually unused for all sorts of payouts adding up to an almost unfathomable $4.7 trillion. Without Treasury Access Symbol (TAS) identification codes associated with those payouts, there’s little hope in figuring out where all that money went.
“In the Federal Government, the TAS field was optional for ~$4.7 Trillion in payments and was often left blank, making traceability almost impossible,” DOGE announced via its X account. Thanks to DOGE, those “optional” days are over. “As of Saturday, this is now a required field, increasing insight into where money is actually going,” DOGE added.
DOGE’s scrutiny of various government agencies is eliciting high-pitched shrieks from nearly every leftist in America, from establishment politicians who don’t want the curtain that hides their hijinks and grifting torn down, to your liberal sister-in-law who thinks the government has an endless supply of money and that it spends it all virtuously.
Earlier this month, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent pushed back on portrayals of DOGE employees as reckless rogues. “These are highly trained professionals,” he told Bloomberg. “This is not some roving band going around doing things. This is methodical and it is going to yield big savings.”
In the wake of the latest revelation that makes normal people glad that DOGE teams are scouring the federal government, Democrats desperately tried to find a way to make it sound bad that DOGE exposed trillions in untraceable payouts and promptly instituted tighter accounting discipline.
Meanwhile, leftists have also been foaming at the mouth over news that DOGE staffers are looking into the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) books, as if they were going to start rerouting funds to Tesla. Considering Social Security is careening toward mandatory benefit cuts as soon as 2033, everyone should welcome a team of financial professionals making sure the system isn’t being drained by improper payments.
Of course, that appears to be exactly what’s been happening. On Sunday night, Musk said DOGE might be on the trail of “the biggest fraud in history,” as SSA data appears to show that 20.789 million Americans over the age of 100 are collecting Social Security retirement benefits. That includes 12 million who are purportedly over 120 years old.
Bent on derailing DOGE, Democrats have sued to prevent the organization from accessing federal data associated with the Office of Personnel Management, and the Health and Human Services, Education, Energy, Transportation, Labor and Commerce departments. On Monday, the federal judge handling the request for a restraining order expressed skepticism over Democrats’ challenge, noting that their “evidence” was largely media speculation about potential harms springing from DOGE’s activities: “The courts can’t act based on media reports. We can’t do that.“
A ruling is expected Tuesday. Here’s looking forward to DOGE proceeding to uncover a relentless string of scandals for months and months to come.
The office sector of commercial real estate has been in a depression for about two years, with prices of older office towers plunging by 50%, 60%, or 70% from their last transaction, and sometimes even more, with some office towers selling for land value, with the building by itself being worth next to nothing even in Manhattan.
Landlords of office buildings are having trouble collecting enough in rent to even pay the interest on their loans, and they’re having trouble or are finding it impossible to refinance a maturing loan, and so many of them have stopped making interest payments on their mortgages, and delinquencies continue to spike.
The delinquency rate of office mortgages backing commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) spiked to 9.4% in October, up a full percentage point from September, and the highest since the worst months of the meltdown that followed the Financial Crisis. The delinquency rate has doubled since June 2023 (4.5%), according to data by Trepp, which tracks and analyzes CMBS.
Office CRE fund managers have spread the rumor that office CRE has bottomed out, but the CMBS delinquency rate doesn’t agree with this bottomed-out scenario; it’s aggressively spiking.
Three months ago, the delinquency rate surpassed the surge in delinquencies that followed the American Oil Bust from 2014 through 2016, when hundreds of companies in the US oil-and-gas sector filed for bankruptcy as the price of oil had collapsed due to overproduction, which devastated the Houston office market in 2016.
But now there’s a structural problem that won’t easily go away with the price of oil: A huge office glut has emerged after years of overbuilding and industry hype about the “office shortage” that led big companies to hog office space as soon as it came on the market with the hope they’d grow into it. However, during the pandemic, companies realized that they don’t need all this office space, and vast portions of it sits there vacant and for lease, with vacancy rates in the 25% to 36% range in the biggest markets.
Mortgages are considered delinquent by Trepp when the borrower fails to make the interest payment after the 30-day grace period. A mortgage is not considered delinquent here if the borrower continues to make the interest payment but fails to pay off the mortgage when it matures. This kind of repayment default, while the borrower is current on interest, would be on top of the delinquency rate here.
Loans are pulled off the delinquency list if the interest gets paid, or if the loan is resolved through a foreclosure sale, generally involving big losses for the CMBS holders, or if a deal gets worked out between landlord and the special servicer that represents the CMBS holders, such as the mortgage being restructured or modified and extended.
Survive till 2025 has been the motto. But that might not work either. The Fed has cut its policy rate by 50 basis points in September and is likely to cut more but in smaller increments. Many CRE loans are floating-rate loans that adjust to a short-term rate (SOFR), and short-term rates move largely with the Fed’s policy rates. And floating-rate loans will have lower interest rates as the Fed cuts.
Long-term rates, including fixed-rate mortgage rates have risen sharply since the Fed started cutting rates, so that option isn’t appealing.
So the hope in the CRE industry is that rate cuts will be steep and many, thereby reducing floating-rate interest payments, making it easier for landlords to meet them. And so the prescription was: Survive till 2025, when interest rates would be, they hope, far lower than they were.
But rate cuts will do nothing to address the structural issues that office CRE faces. The landlord of a nearly empty older office tower isn’t going to be able to make the interest payment even at a lower rate when the tower is largely vacant.
And these older office towers face the brunt of the vacancy rates, amid a flight to quality now feasible because of vacancies even at the latest and greatest properties. And there are a lot of these older office towers around that have been refinanced at very high valuations in the years before the pandemic, but whose valuations have now plunged by 50%, 60%, or 70%, and they have become a nightmare for lenders and CMBS holders.
I read “The Arms of Krupp” by William Manchester. A great book about the rise of ThyssenKrupp during World War II. It is one of the world’s largest steel producers, but it now has NEGATIVE ENTERPRISE VALUE.
The cause? Germany is up the creek without an economic paddle after years of gross mismanagement by Angela Merkel and her party. Mass immigration in Germany and a slowdown in the global economy aren’t helping.
The slowing US economy has a silver lining: Treasury and mortgage rates are declining. And the is spurring faster mortgage prepayments.
Mortgage applications increased 6.9 percent from one week earlier, according to data from the Mortgage Bankers Association’s (MBA) Weekly Applications Survey for the week ending August 2, 2024.
The Market Composite Index, a measure of mortgage loan application volume, increased 6.9 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis from one week earlier. On an unadjusted basis, the Index increased 6 percent compared with the previous week. The seasonally adjusted Purchase Index increased 1 percent from one week earlier. The unadjusted Purchase Index increased 0.3 percent compared with the previous week and was 11 percent lower than the same week one year ago.
The Refinance Index increased 16 percent from the previous week and was 59 percent higher than the same week one year ago.
The average contract interest rate for 30-year fixed-rate mortgages with conforming loan balances ($766,550 or less) decreased to 6.55 percent from 6.82 percent, with points decreasing to 0.58 from 0.62 (including the origination fee) for 80 percent loan-to-value ratio (LTV) loans.
The deciine in rates led to an increase in MBS convexity.
Confounded Interest - Anthony B. Sanders 
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