Sales of new
homes cooled off in December compared with November but for the entire year
were the best since 2009.
The Commerce Department said Friday that new-home sales fell
7.3 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 369,000. That’s
down from November’s rate of 398,000, which was the fastest in 2 1/2 years.
For the year, sales rose nearly 20 percent to 367,000.
That’s the most since 2009, although the increase is coming off the worst year
for new-home sales since the government began keeping records in 1963. Sales
are still below the 700,000 level that economists consider healthy.
The housing market began to recovery last year, roughly five
years after the housing bubble burst. Stable job gains and record-low mortgage
rates encouraged more people to buy homes. Prices have been rising on a
sustained basis. And builders started to increase construction of new homes,
partly because the supply of homes had thinned to extremely low levels.
For December, new-home sales fell 29 percent in the
Northeast, 11 percent in the West and roughly 8 percent in the South. Only the
The median price for a new home rose in December to
$248,900, up 1.3 percent from November and 13.8 percent from December 2011.
The housing market has a long way back to a full recovery.
But most economists expect the recovery will strengthen in 2013.
The gains in home building helped boost construction hiring
in December by 30,000 jobs, the most in 15 months.
