The Economic and Revenue Forecast Council issued its monthly Economic and Revenue Update this morning. Here are the key bullets on revenue from the summary:

• Major General Fund-State revenue collections for the September 11 – October 10, 2015 collection period came in $27.9 million (2.2%) above the September forecast.
• During the period there was a $6.1 million audit payment that was not included in the forecast. Without this payment, collections would have been $21.8 million (1.8%) higher than forecasted.

About half of the positive variance, $10.6 million, was due to the difficult to forecast real estate excises tax. The good news is that residential rather than commercial sales accounted for the windfall.

This is the first collections report since the September 14 meeting at which the ERFC revised downward (by about $1 million per month) its forecast of revenue over the remainder of the 2015-17 biennium. See this post.

Here is a chart snipped from the Update showing monthly seasonally-adjusted Revenue Act collections since 2004.