Texas Manufactured Housing Sales in April 2020 and May Early Read

May Preliminary Data

The early look on May shows the month slightly trailing April and down 15% year-over-year on May of 2019. TDHCA was closed for a week in July due to positive COVID-19 tests and their average daily titling rate for new homes in July has dropped to 54 titles per day, which is below our series average for the month.

Using a linear regression model to forecast where May sales will ultimately finish for the year when all the subsequent titles have been issued, we’re currently forecasting 1,164 new home sales for the month. As we’ve said before, the early read data totals are subject to a high level of random variation and our model can only account for roughly 84% of the variation in what the ultimate sales total for the month will be.

There’s good reason to believe that this month’s forecast and the month-over-month comparisons are too bearish because of the break in titling. I suspect that as the agency has time to catch up on title processing, the forecast and month-over-month comparisons for May will look better when we release the on-time titled sales in a month from now.

Similar to the new chart we released with shipments at the beginning of the month, we’ve got a new year-over-year chart that shows the comparison of exactly where 2020 is coming in for each month compared to all prior years in our series.

April Data

New home sales in April titled on-time came in -11% below March and down -22% from April of 2019. The slowdown in titling likely impacted these totals and their month-over-month comparisons, but not as dramatically as it would have for May.

We’ve built a linear regression model to forecast final totals based on sales titled on-time as well and we have the April forecasted total coming in at 1,186. Forecasting from sales totals titled on-time provides a more accurate prediction with the model accounting for roughly 94% of the variation in final totals.

When forecasting it is important to note that the probability of final sales ending up right at 1,186 is very small, and the 95% confidence interval for total sales is plus or minus 110 homes. The plus or minus on the early data forecast is a full 177 homes.

April final sales in 2019 came in at 1,488 so our forecast is projecting a -20% decline in sales for April 2020.

The median age for a single-section home continued to trend lower in April.

Montgomery County had a solid April to land in the top spot for new home installations.

Used home sales were way down from last year due to an April 2019 community title transfer.

Annual Totals

New home sales are now down -7.3% from 2019 and will continue to decrease going forward.

Montgomery County remains number one for new home installations on the year.

March Revisions

Revised Monthly Totals

Because titles continue to come in for past months sales, here are all prior months for the year and what their current sales totals are at.

Note: These calculations are based on titles processed by TDHCA through 2020-07-17. Late submissions will impact these figures going forward.

Charts

This new report shows sales totals per month only for titles issued through the same point historically in previous years.

Note: These calculations are based on titles processed by TDHCA through 2020-07-17. Late submissions will impact these figures going forward.

Note: These calculations are based on titles processed by TDHCA through 2020-07-17. Late submissions will impact these figures going forward.

Note: These calculations are based on titles processed by TDHCA through 2020-07-17. Late submissions will impact these figures going forward.

Note: These calculations are based on titles processed by TDHCA through 2020-07-17. Late submissions will impact these figures going forward.

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