US Existing-Home Sales Rise to Fastest Pace in Seven Months

Watch US Existing-Home Sales Rise to Fastest Pace in Seven Months - Bloomberg on Dailymotion

Transcript

00:00Are you surprised? I mean, I guess they match the survey. What does this mean?

00:04Well, this data is produced by the National Association of Realtors, so it's alternative data,

00:09and it doesn't get affected by the government showdown.

00:12We're up 1.5% to a 4,060,000 pace on the year, which is slightly above where it was last month.

00:21So that's good news. There were some more homes that went on the market.

00:24Of course, this is September data. Everybody wants to sell their house before school starts,

00:27so that may have been some of the motivation for it.

00:30It's the fastest pace of sales in six months, so there's some good news there as well.

00:37The month's supply doesn't change, though. We still have 4.6 months' worth,

00:41which doesn't suggest that they're making progress on that.

00:44And we also are seeing single-family homes up by 1.7%,

00:49while condos and co-ops, multifamily homes, no change at all.

00:54So not a lot of building, not a lot of additional properties going on the markets.

01:00Basically, at this point, people still sitting still.

01:03Little change on the month, is what you'd say.

01:07I guess as every piece of data comes in now from private companies,

01:11it seems to be of more importance.

01:13Maybe this isn't going to move the needle that much because it came bang in line.

01:15But what does the Fed turn to right now?

01:17There was this story out there yesterday that they lost access to private payroll data from ADP.

01:23So what is the Fed looking to, and less than a week to go, for its decision?

01:28Well, they're looking at just about everything you can find on Matt's favorite page,

01:31which is WSLALTE, alternate data, Bloomberg's long list of the available data

01:37that's not government data for you.

01:41But they're trying to put together a picture based on sort of point-a-list, we'd call.

01:46A lot of points.

01:47And try to put it all together.

01:49They're looking, obviously, tomorrow at the CPI report.

01:51They're looking at other data sources.

01:53We do get the raw data on jobless claims this afternoon.

01:57It may not be adjusted exactly the same as you get from the Labor Department every week.

02:03But we can adjust it pretty close and have a pretty good idea of what jobless claims are doing.

02:07And the Fed, I'm sure, can do that even better.

02:10They did lose the ADP data.

02:11Not sure why.

02:12ADP is not answering the phone.

02:13And so that's one less set of alternative data that they have.

02:18But there's a lot out there for them to try to get a fairly good picture of what's going on.