WASHINGTON – New-home sales nationwide resumed their decline last month after a one-month interruption, according to the joint report released today by the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Sales of new single-family homes fell in May to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 512,000 – their ninth decline of the past 10 months – falling 2.5 percent compared with April’s revised 525,000 units per year and 40.3 percent compared with May 2007’s 857,000 units per year. But sales remained stronger than the March pace of 501,000 houses per year that was the lowest in nearly 17 years. (READ MORE)
The decline was in line with analyst expectations, based on the median forecast of 73 economist surveyed by Bloomberg News. (Their estimates ranged from 480,000 to 570,000.)
Prices also fell, with the median price of new single-family homes sold in May nationwide dipping to $231,000, a decline of 5.1 percent from April’s $243,500 and 5.7 percent from the year-ago $245,000.
The number of new homes on the market dipped 453,000 at the end of the month, a decline of 1.7 percent from April and 16.9 percent from a year ago.
At the current sales pace, that amounted to a 10.9-month supply – the second-highest this year, after March’s 11.4 months. The May housing supply represented a 1.9-percent increase from April’s 10.7-month supply and a 39.7-percent increase from the year-ago 7.8-month supply.
In the Northeast, new-home sales fell to a May pace of 35,000 units per year, a 7.9-percent decline from April’s 38,000 units per year and a 57.8-percent decline from the year-ago pace of 83,000 per year. That left the region with 450,000 new houses on the market at the end of last month, down from 459,000 at the end of April and 544,000 at the end of May 2007.
Sales also fell last month in the West (11.6 percent), but increased in the Midwest (5.1 percent) and South (0.4 percent). Compared with a year ago, sales fell in all regions. But May sales were stronger than those in March in both the Midwest and the Northeast.
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“You are seeing sales now stable at a roughly low level,” Michael Feroli, an economist at JPMorgan Chase & Co. in New York, told Bloomberg News. But, he conceded, “there is very slow progress on inventories.”
Additional information, including the full New Residential Sales report, is available from the U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of the Census at www.census.gov/newhomesales.
