Did new-home sales really surge in June?

No.

But you could get that impression, as articles emphasize that sales were up 11 percent from May, the biggest gain in eight years.

That calculation is based on seasonally adjusted annual rates, which went from a rate of 346,000 in May to 384,000 in June, for the highest rate since November.

A year ago, when there were headlines about how bad sales were, the annual rate for June was 488,000, which was then the lowest for any month since 1991. Somehow a headline that says “sales fall 21 percent from year-ago levels” would not sound the same as the headlines that are now running.

In actual sales, the preliminary estimate is that 36,000 homes were sold, up 3,000 from May but down 9,000 from last June.

To put it another way, this was the second-worst June since they began counting new-home sales in 1963. It was not quite as bad as June 1982, when the country was mired in a deep recession and interest rates were sky high. Then 34,000 new homes were sold.

There are twice as many households in America as there were then, so relative to population this was the worst June ever, by far.

The best that can be said is that there has been a stabilization since the credit crunch eased a bit. If you qualify for a loan that Fannie or Freddie will buy, rates are low and there may even be a government subsidy if you are a first-time buyer. But few banks want to make mortgage loans they cannot sell to a government agency.

At the same time, new homes keep getting older. There are now 128,000 completed new homes available for sale. That is down from the peak of 199,000 in January 2008, but it is a larger supply than there ever was before 2006.

The average age of those “new” homes is now 11.8 months, up from 8.4 months a year ago — and that was then a record. The industry has made little progress in unloading some of its least well-planned “communities.”

My Off the Charts column on Saturday reviewed evidence that the recession is about over. I think it is, but that does not mean that we can expect much growth in the near future.