June 2016 Reports and July Preliminary Data

This post is going to be a little different today, mostly because this story is too good not to share. Recall that I announced last week the release of our new Annual Manufacturer Shipments Report and I had intended on sending out a shipment specific post when we had received and processed July’s shipment numbers at the end of last month. At that time, we had just come back from convention where the mood was upbeat and optimistic about the current state of the market, June’s shipments had been really solid, and I heard a lot about manufacturers having large back logs and running close to full production. So imagine my surprise when I kicked off the processing job and saw the numbers -29.86% over June and -29.98% over last July pop up. Gulp . Houston we have a problem.

After confirming that these numbers were indeed an accurate processing of the source data, I quickly reached out to a number of our manufacturer members to find out what apocalyptic event had occurred that had sent orders or shipments off the rails.

The answer it appears, is that America had a birthday.

With the 4th falling on a Monday this year, many of the manufacturers closed for the week leaving only three weeks of production for the month which is unusual. It also explains at least some of the uptick we saw last month for June shipments.

When looking at the year to date mark shipments are down -5.77% on the year and that decline is due to an -11.61% decrease is single-section homes. Multi-section homes are still tracking above last year’s total by 1.89% or 66 units. Production numbers for the state are essentially flat year over year, so I am still optimistic despite the brief heart palpitations I experienced when the shipment numbers rolled in, and we’ll know more at the end of this month when we receive the data for August.

And now back to our previously scheduled program.

New titles closed out June 9.69% over May and 6.9% over June of 2015 and kept us up over 7% for the year. The top five counties for the month were:

1. Montgomery (44 homes)
2. Travis (42 homes)
3. Harris (40 homes)
4. Bexar (39 homes)
5. Tarrant (28 homes)

There was a little reshuffling of the top ten counties for new installs on the year with Brazoria (+51.79%) over taking Ector (-34.38%) for the fifth slot and Hidalgo (+8.16%) leapfrogging Johnson (+18.82%), Bastrop (+46.38%) and Hardin (+17.24%) to land in tenth place.

Looking at July, new titles continue to paint a different picture than shipments with the preliminary numbers up across the board for single (+6.34%) and multi-section homes (+20.44%) putting total new homes titled for the month up 12.95% over July of 2015.