It had it’s worst year on record since 1963:
The housing industry, caught in a maelstrom of sinking demand, rising foreclosures, and bulging inventories, is in its worst slump in decades, a growing body of economic evidence shows.
Sales of new homes fell last year by 26 percent, the steepest drop since records began in 1963, the Commerce Department said on Monday.[
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Last month alone, sales of new homes tumbled 4.7 percent, to a 604,000 annual rate, the smallest monthly sales figure since February 1995.
Prices also fell sharply. In December, the median price of a new home fell to $219,200, down 10.9 percent from December 2006.
“No matter which way you look at it, the December new home sales report is simply awful,” wrote Dimitry Fleming, an economist at ING Bank.
December capped off a painful year for home builders, who have watched demand dry up as buyers abandon contracts or stay on the sidelines with the expectation that prices will fall further. For the year, the median price of new homes rose just 0.2 percent, to $246,900.
This follows last weeks report on the state of the existing home market in 2007:
Last week, the National Association of Realtors reported that sales of previously owned single-family homes, a large portion of the overall housing market, suffered their biggest annual drop in 25 years. And the median price of those homes fell for the first time in at least four decades, and possibly since the Great Depression.
We’ll be dealing with this for awhile longer folks.
