By Susan A. Baird
PBN Web Editor
WASHINGTON – Existing-home sales nationwide last year fell 13 percent from their 2006 level, to 5.70 million single-family houses, condominiums, co-ops and townhouses sold in 2007, based on statistics released today by the National Association of Realtors.
The decline continued last month, when sales slowed more sharply than expected. The sales rate for existing homes nationwide was 4.89 million per year, 2.2 percent below the November pace of 5.00 million per year and 22.0 percent below the December 2006 pace, the NAR said.
Analysts had expected sales to slow 1.0 percent last month to 4.94 million units per year, based on the median forecast from a Bloomberg News survey of 71 economists. (Their estimates ranged from 4.75 million to 5.15 million units per year.)
“I do expect sales to remain soft through the first quarter and possibly the second quarter,” Lawrence Yun, the NAR’s chief economist, wrote in the report.
In the Northeast last month, the sales pace for existing homes was a seasonally adjusted 830,000 units per year, a decline of 4.6 percent from November and 22.4 percent from December 2006. Although sales also slowed in the other three regions, the Northeast had the largest monthly decline. The largest yearly decline, however, was in the West, where December sales fell 24.8 percent.
“We are not at the bottom in the housing market,” Nigel Gault, director of U.S. research at Global Insight Inc., a forecasting firm in Lexington, Mass., told Bloomberg News. “The Fed is trying to battle against the fundamentals, which say housing is not going to recover until we have a substantial decline in prices.”
The National Association of Realtors is the nation’s largest trade association, with more than 1.3 million members in all aspects of residential and commercial real estate. Additional information is available at www.realtor.org.
