How far back does new home sales data go?

The answer lives in one dataset. US Census New Residential Sales, the Bureau's monthly report on new single-family houses sold and for sale, holds annual series from 1963 to present, with monthly detail layered on top in recent years. The history is not scattered across an archive: it sits in ten historical Excel workbooks of roughly 35-85 KB each, about 60-75 rows apiece, downloadable without registration from census.gov/construction/nrs/.

One scope note keeps the series honest: coverage is limited to new, privately-owned residential units, and existing homes are excluded by Survey of Construction definition. Anyone comparing these figures against resale-market series needs a different source for the other side of the market.

1. sold_cust.xlsx - new houses sold, annual and monthly, national and by Census region, back to 1963.
2. fsale_cust.xlsx - new houses for sale, the inventory leg of the same period.
3. stage_cust.xlsx - sold and for sale by stage of construction (not started, under construction, completed).
4. price_cust.xlsx - median and average sales price of new houses sold, national, back to 1963.
5. pricereg_cust.xlsx - median and average price broken out by region.
6. pricerange_cust.xlsx - sales by price range, 2020-present.
7. usregsoldbyprice_2002_cust.xls - the 2002-2019 price-range grouping.
8. usregsoldbyprice_1999_cust.xls - the original 1999-2005 band definitions.
9. soldfinc_cust.xlsx - houses sold by type of financing.
10. pricefinc.xlsx - price by type of financing.

A quarterly "Sales by Price and Financing" PDF cross-tabs price bands against financing types, and a Time Series/Trend Charts tool builds custom national or regional series on demand. Months' supply appears in the press-release tables rather than as one of the ten named historical files, so absorption-rate histories need to be derived from sold and for-sale counts or taken release by release.

Two structural breaks are worth planning around before you treat 1963-to-present as one smooth column.

New Residential Sales is one program inside a four-program Census stack, and each neighbor carries its own clock:

The aggregate files stop at region, and they summarize. When a question needs the transaction itself - time from start to sale, price dispersion within one division, the mix of completed versus not-started units - the record-level alternative begins much later than 1963.

The Survey of Construction program hub publishes one microdata file per year from 1999 to 2025, each covering tens of thousands of sampled units with Census division and metropolitan identifiers. Fields include STRT, COMP and SALE dates plus SLPR, the sales price at first contract signing including the improved lot, top/bottom coded within division for disclosure. The 27-year window cannot extend the 1963 aggregate history backwards, but it does let you reconstruct distributional detail the summary tables never carried.

Two adjacent pages extend the timeline question. Housing Market Index history covers the sentiment side, where the monthly NAHB/Wells Fargo series starts in January 1985 - about 500 observations, roughly a quarter century shorter than the sales record here. And the US Census New Residential Sales dataset page documents the ten workbooks field by field, including the sample rows behind the 1963 figures cited above.