How 2020 broke the housing market: So many homes are selling that we could run out of new houses in months

How 2020 broke the housing market: So many homes are selling that we could run out of new houses in months

The hottest pandemic purchase is a house, as more and more Americans take advantage of low mortgage rates to attain spacious backyards and more comfortable work-from-home locales.

Existing home sales, which have trended upward for the last 3 months since the housing market reopened from shutdown, soared to a 14-year high in August. New home sales are also up.

Home prices are soaring, too, recording the highest two-month appreciation between May and July “” at 2% “” in 30 years of record-keeping.

But not enough new houses are being built to keep up with demand, a trend that actually goes back a decade.

Homebuying, in all its trendy glory, only projects to get more expensive, if not impossible. If homes keep selling at this rate, Bloomberg estimates the inventory of new homes