Texas Manufactured Housing Sales in November 2020 and December Early Read

December Preliminary Data

First off, I hope that all of you and your loved ones are safe now that the artic temperatures of Uri have passed and that we can all get back to something closer to what life was like 14 months ago. I’d prefer pre-pandemic life to just simply life before the storm, and I’m hopeful that we will continue to make progress to those ends as vaccine availability continues to improve and as that Texas sun continues to shine longer and longer each day.

The MH division of TDHCA was not immune to the utility and transportation issues that rocked the state during Uri, and title processing was offline last week. That means that this report and our forecasts are not operating with the amount of data they would typically have when doing month-over-month comparisons or when projecting out how many more sales to expect based on sales accounted for thus far.

February being a short month and following three of the lowest sales months is typically the trough for total titles issued by TDHCA. At this point in our series we would expect about 19 days of titles to have come in, but the department closing from the hazardous conditions has left us with only 10 days of titling data for the month, and those 10 days are running at a lower rate than we’ve seen since 2014.

I won’t spend much time analyzing the depressed numbers, but I do want to call out that prior to Uri, we were seeing a slowdown in the pace of Q4 2020 sales over 2019 sales and that November had started to run even with 2019’s pace and December had fallen behind. This week’s data gap makes that delta harder to assess, it could have been noise, or it could have been that 2020’s blistering sales pace started to slow those last two months of the year. We’ll know more as titling catches back up.

Our forecast for December new home sales is currently 1,163 +/- 177, but as outlined above, take the over.

November Data

The November data will be more robust to the impact of the titling outage and it is clear that single-section sales slowed down dramatically from October of 2020 and from November of 2019.

The final forecast for new home sales in November has moved down to 1,354 +/- 91. That would still be enough to beat shipments for the month, but once again I’d take the over.

Annual Totals

Annual sales for 2020 lowered their pace on a combination of slower sales at the end of Q4 and from the titling data gap from Winter Storm Uri. New home sales for 2020 are now up only 2.3% over 2019 and the forecast for total sales on the year has moved down to 16,419 +/- 635.

Revised Monthly Totals

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

Note: These calculations are based on titles processed by TDHCA through 2021-02-21. Late submissions will impact these figures going forward.

Charts

This first chart shows what monthly sales totals look like for each year in the series for titles processed through 2-21. Sales had been at monthly series highs since June of 2020, but November and December have slowed organically and from the Uri titling disruption.

Note: These calculations are based on titles processed by TDHCA through 2021-02-21. Late submissions will impact these figures going forward.

The second chart shows monthly totals at the official release date for each month. All of these totals have moved up since release, and the most recent totals can be seen in the chart below this one.

Note: These calculations are based on titles processed by TDHCA through 2021-02-21. Late submissions will impact these figures going forward.

The third chart is all sales data in the series to date with single-section and multi-section home totals plotted.

Note: These calculations are based on titles processed by TDHCA through 2021-02-21. Late submissions will impact these figures going forward.

This is a new chart tracking the difference between shipments and sales each month. Because late title work pushes recent sales totals up, I’m including data through the previous officially released sales month. Sales are expected to outpace shipments for October and November. December shipments have a chance of beating December sales.

Note: These calculations are based on titles processed by TDHCA through 2021-02-21. Late submissions will impact these figures going forward.

The fifth chart is the annual median for the number of days between a homes date of sale and it’s date of manufacture. Prior to 2/22/21 this chart included sales from manufacturers to communities, it now only includes sales from licensed retailers.

Note: These calculations are based on titles processed by TDHCA through 2021-02-21. Late submissions will impact these figures going forward.

The final chart is for all used monthly retail sales data. The outliers are typically the result of community purchases were titles move from the previous to the new MHC owner.

Note: These calculations are based on titles processed by TDHCA through 2021-02-21. Late submissions will impact these figures going forward.

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