US New-Home Sales at 10-Month Low

New home sales plummeted 11.5% between August and September, reaching a seasonally adjusted rate of 468,000, the Commerce Department reported Monday.

September’s pace of newly built home sales is up 2% from September a year ago.

Although sales fell in all regions, the Northeast experienced a 62% decline – the largest one-month percentage drop by any region in the history of a report that goes back to 1973.

The median price of new houses sold was $296,900, while the average sales price of $364,100, the Census Bureau said.

“We assume credit availability remains a major problem for the market”, said Mike Englund, chief economist at Action Economics LLC in Boulder, Colorado, who is among the best forecasters of new-home sales over the past two years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Economists forecast new home sales slipping to only a rate of 550,000 units.

With sales weak, the stock of new houses for sale increased 4.2 percent to 225,000 last month, the highest level since March 2010.

The housing market has advanced from the depths of the Great Recession, although it has yet to fully recover from the bursting of the housing bubble and the 2008 financial crisis. Existing-home sales account for about 90% of the residential real-estate market. Meanwhile, the Midwest, South and West posted month-over-month decreases of 8.3%, 8.7% and 6.7%, respectively.

Purchases of existing homes climbed 4.7 percent to a 5.55 million annualized rate in September, due entirely to a jump in purchases of single-family dwellings, the National Association of Realtors said Thursday.

The revision to the August rate added 7,000 to the month’s total, making the September drop just that much worse. But the number of listings on the market has dropped 3.1 percent during that time.