By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.
The Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development jointly produce the data on new single-family houses: permits, construction starts and completions, inventories at all stages of construction, sales at all stages of construction, median and average contract sales prices, and related data.
Whatever happened during the pandemic in collecting and processing the data, the Census Bureau and HUD decided that the pricing data was totally screwed up and needed to be fixed, and they dramatically revised the sales prices that had been collected during the pandemic.
And today, as part of this, they announced huge revisions to the pricing data going back through 2020. For example, they chopped off $36,000 from the median price at the peak in October 2022, taking it from the old $496,800 to the new-and-improved $460,300.