Wednesday January 30, 2008

New home sales plunge record 26% in 2007

news.yahoo.com :

Sales of new single-family homes plummeted a record 26% in 2007 and builders slashed prices by the most since 1970 in a struggle to cope with a housing bust, a government report showed on Monday [28 Jan 2008]. The report offered little hope for a turnaround any time soon as a record one-month drop in the median home price for December failed to stoke demand and the number of months needed to clear the inventory of unsold homes rose.

The figure of 774,000 homes sold last year was the lowest since 757,000 were sold in 1996. Sales have tumbled 39.6% from 1.283 million at the peak of the market in 2005. The median new home sales price fell 10.9% from November to $219,200, 10.4% below the year-ago level. However, despite those price cuts the glut of houses available continued to swell and put pressure on builders to slow construction below its current crawl, economists said.

- There's got to be a bottom, we just haven't seen it yet. Could take a while. And there's always the "hyper-inflation option".

See also :

1. Median home price dropped for first time in 40 years
2. Housing sales drop in 40 states

(2008-01-30 08:08:08 SGT) [Biz] Permalink

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