Texas Manufactured Housing Sales in May 2020 and June Early Read

June Preliminary Data

New manufactured home sales for June 2020 are on pace to hit the highest total sales for the month of June in our 9-year series and are up 12.2% over 2019. With titles processed to this point we are forecasting June sales to end up at 1,576, which would beat the June record of 1,507 set in 2018. It is important to note that early read forecasts are revised when we reach the month’s official report release in one month’s time, and that those later forecasts increase in accuracy.

TDHCA’s titling rate hit an all-time high in July but is now lagging the past two years in August with an average of 61 new home sales getting titled each day this month. That increase and subsequent decline could indicate that June sales titled were front-loaded and might slow down over the next month, or that sales in July cooled in comparison to 2019.

May Data

New manufactured home sales in May came in 23.7% higher than April, and just -2.7% behind May of 2019. Sales haven’t come anywhere near that close to a 2019 total since February came in down -2% before the coronavirus outbreak hit hard in March.

The 1,216 new home sales has already beaten last month’s final total forecast which was depressed by a halt in titling at the department due to positive Covid-19 tests.

We are now forecasting that 1,452 new homes were sold in May. (+/- 91)

New homes sold in May skewed much older than they did in April.

Liberty County was first for new home placements in May, and Ector saw a huge uptick.

Used home sales were inflated by a community purchase in Howe, TX.

Annual Totals

New home sales on the year are trailing 2019 by only -5.4%, with that spread set to tighten when June’s numbers are included next month.

We’ve built an exponential smoothing model that uses historical sales going back to 2012 and imputes the last 7 months worth of totals with our regression model forecasts. We can use this model to then forecast the remaining months of the year taking into account trending and seasonality. The confidence intervals for the months forecasted using only prior month sales are much wider than those for which we have data and can rely on our regression model, so at each release the confidence interval for the forecast will tighten as another month moves from an exponentially smoothed forecast to a regression model forecast based on the titles that came in on-time.

At present our model is forecasting 15,630 new home sales for 2020. (+/- 1,960)

We’re now running at series highs for the median number of days between a home’s date of sale and it’s manufactured date for both single and multi-section homes.

Montgomery County remains number one for new home installations on the year, and Liberty county has surpassed Harris for the number two spot.

April 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 2020-08-17. Late submissions will impact these figures going forward.

Charts

June of 2020 is on a record pace.

Note: These calculations are based on titles processed by TDHCA through 2020-08-17. Late submissions will impact these figures going forward.

Note: These calculations are based on titles processed by TDHCA through 2020-08-17. Late submissions will impact these figures going forward.

Note: These calculations are based on titles processed by TDHCA through 2020-08-17. Late submissions will impact these figures going forward.

Note: These calculations are based on titles processed by TDHCA through 2020-08-17. Late submissions will impact these figures going forward.

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