New home sales rise 1.7% nationwide, 1.8% in N.E.

WASHINGTON – Sales of new single-family homes nationwide rose 1.7 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted rate of 728,000 houses per year, from a sharply revised September pace of 716,000 that was the lowest in nearly 12 years, according to the joint report released today by the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Compared with the October 2006 rate of 952,000 units per year, sales fell 23.5 percent.
Last month’s rate lagged the mean prediction from a Bloomberg News survey of 71 economists, which called for sales to decline to an annual rate of 750,000 units per year from the original September estimate of 770,000.
The median price of new homes sold nationwide in October was $217,800, a decline of 8.6 percent from the previous month’s $238,400 and l3 percent from the year-ago $306,800.
The nation’s new-home inventory shrank to an estimated 516,000 unsold units at the end of October, a 2.3-percent decline from the end of September and a 6.7-percent decline from a year ago. That represented an 8.5-month supply at the current sales pace, 5.6 percent less than September’s 9.0-month supply but 19.7 percent more than October 2006’s 7.1-month supply.
“There is no question there has been another big leg down in housing in recent months,” James O’Sullivan, a senior economist at UBS Securities LLC in Stamford, Conn., told Bloomberg News. “Prices will continue to slip.”
In the Northeast, sales of new single-family homes rose 1.8 percent from their September level to a seasonally adjusted October rate of 56,000 units per year, an increase of 43.6 percent from the October 2006 new-home sales rate of 39,000 units per year. The inventory of new houses for sale in the region at the end of the October was unchanged from a month earlier at 51,000, a 5.5-percent decline from the year-ago inventory of 54,000.
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.