It's also pretty typical for house sales to drop in the winter because people tend to not want to move during the holiday season. The biggest time for house purchases seems to be in the summer, when kids are out of school and the weather is nicer.

New home sales plunged 17.3% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 610,000 units last month, the lowest level since December 2022, the Commerce Department’s Census Bureau said on Tuesday.

I think a more reasonable explanation is that the housing market was nuts from a little before Covid through probably around EOY 2022, so Dec. 2022 levels is still probably a little elevated vs "normal," whatever that means. This article seems a bit more alarmist than necessary...

This (at the end) is far more interesting to me than the rest of the article:

The median new house price increased 4.7% to $437,300 in October from a year earlier. The inventory of new homes increased to 481,000, the highest level since early 2008, from 471, 000 units in September.

That's quite a bit of inventory, so this should drive mortgage rates down over the next year, especially since the reduced fed funds rate gives a bit more room for rates to fall.