WASHINGTON – Sales of new single-family homes last month fell 3.9 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 848,000 homes, from January’s rate of 882,000 units per year, according to a report today by the U.S. Commerce Department’s Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. That was 18.3 percent below the February 2006 rate of 1.038 million units per year.
After reports last week showing that housing starts and sales of existing homes both rose in February, economists surveyed by Bloomberg News had expected the rate of new-home sales to rise as well, to 985,000 units per year from January’s previously reported 937,000.
The median price of new homes sold last month rose 4.6 percent to $250,000, from January’s median of $239,000, but declined 0.3 percent from the year-ago $250,800, the report showed.
The seasonally adjusted estimate of 546,000 new homes on the U.S. market at the end of last month represented an 8.1-month supply at the current rate of sales, an increase of 11.0 percent from January’s 7.3-month supply and 26.6 percent from February 2006’s 6.4-month supply.
“The housing industry is still on the ropes,” Brian Bethune, an economist at Global Insight Inc. in Lexington, Mass., told Bloomberg before this morning’s report, adding: “The weather may have muddled up the numbers a bit last month, and it probably won’t be until we see March and April figures that we’ll get a clear line of sight.”
The sharpest decline in new-home sales was seen in the Northeast, where the rate fell to 41,000 units per year, plunging 26.8 percent from January’s 56,000 and 36.9 percent from the year-ago 65,000 units per year.
Smaller declines were seen in the Midwest, where sales were 20 percent below January’s rate, and the South, where sales were 7 percent lower. In the West, sales rose 24.6 percent above the January rate. But sales in all regions lagged year-ago levels.
Additional information is available at www.census.gov.
