WASHINGTON – New-house sales nationwide rebounded last month from August’s 17-year low, in their third month-over-month gain of 2008, according to the joint report released today by the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Sales in the Northeast fell sharply compared with August, however, while sales in every region fell compared with a year ago.

Nationwide in September, new single-family homes were sold at a seasonally adjusted rate of 464,000 units per year that, although the second-slowest this year, was 2.7 percent stronger than August’s downwardly-revised annual pace of 452,000 units. Yet that still represented a 33.1-percent decline from the nation’s September 2007 rate of 694,000 new-house sales per year.

Analysts had expected the annual sales pace would fall to 450,000 – from August’s initially reported 460,000-per-year pace – based on the median forecast from a Bloomberg News survey of 59 economists. (Their forecasts of the September sales pace ranged from 400,000 to 501,000 units per year.)

Prices, however, continued to fall. The median price of new houses sold in September dipped to a four-year low of $218,400, a decline of 0.91 percent from August’s revised median of $220,400 and 9.11 percent from the year-ago price of $240,300.

Yet, on the brighter side, builders’ inventories shrank at a record pace. The number of new single-family homes on the market fell to a seasonally adjusted 394,000 at the end of September, the Census Bureau found. That represented a decline of 7.3 percent from the month before and 25.4 percent from September 2007, and left the nation with its smallest new-house inventory since June 2004.

At the current sales pace, that amounted to a 10.6-month supply – a decline of 8.8 percent from the nation’s 11.4-month supply at the end of August but an increase of 10.6 percent from the 9.4-month supply at the end of September 2007.

Meanwhile, in the Northeast, new single-family homes were sold in September at a rate of 65,000 per year – a decline of 21.4 percent from August’s pace of 28,000 units per year and 65.1 percent from September 2007’s 63,000-per-year pace. That left the region with 41,000 new houses on the market at the end of last month – 21.4 percent fewer than the month-ago 43,000 and 65.1 percent fewer than the year-ago 50,000 units for sale.

Sales rose compared with August in the West (+22.7 percent) and the South (0.7 percent), but fell in the West (-5.8 percent). Compared with a year ago, sales fell in every region.

“Builders are seeing the light: They are cutting prices more aggressively,” Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com in West Chester, Pa., told Bloomberg Television. “They’re very nervous about all the foreclosures” currently flooding the housing market.

New-home purchases – about 10 percent of total housing sales – are considered a leading indicator for the U.S. housing market because they are registered at the time a contract is signed, rather than at the closing that often comes a month or more later.

Today’s government report follows similar news on existing homes from the National Association of Realtors. That report, issued Friday, found sales of existing homes rose 5.5 percent month-over-month and 1.4 percent year-over-year to a September pace of 5.18 million per year – the fastest of the past year – as their median price continued to fall.

“The sales turnaround which began in California several months ago is broadening now to Colorado, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri and Rhode Island,” Lawrence Yun, the NAR’s chief economist, wrote in the group’s Friday report.

“Distressed” properties (homes in or at risk of foreclosure) “are currently 35 to 40 percent of transactions,” Yun added. “These are pulling the median price down because many are being sold at discounted prices.” Yet, he said, “the current market is not being dominated by speculative investors. Rather, 80 percent of current buyers are purchasing a primary residence, which is a bit higher than historic norms.”

Additional information, including the full New Residential Sales report, is available from the U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of the Census at www.census.gov/newhomesales.

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.