The annual rate of the nation’s new home sales increased last month, and it was the rate in the Northeast the led the month-over-month gain.
Government data that was released on Tuesday indicate that
there were a preliminary 61,000 new single-family houses sold during April.
That was solidly higher than in the previous month, when there were an upwardly revised 50,000 new residential transactions completed.
It was also a nice improvement over one year previous, when new single-family home sales totaled 48,000.
The activity was jointly reported Tuesday by the Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
On a seasonally adjusted basis, the annual rate of new home sales during the most-recent month worked out to 619,000.
Activity accelerated versus March’s upwardly revised 531,000 annual rate and April 2015’s downwardly revised 500,000 rate.
The seasonally adjusted annual rate skyrocketed 323 percent from a year earlier in the Northeast to 55,000. In the South, the rate jumped by nearly a quarter to 152,000, while it ascended 17 percent in the West to 243,000.
The Midwest was the only region to experience a year-over-year decline — down 9 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 60,000.
Without any seasonal adjustments,
there were 239,000 new U.S. homes for sale as of the end of last month, slightly fewer than the the downwardly revised new-home inventory of 241,000 at the end of March but more than the 205,000 new homes for sale at the same point in 2015.
The current inventory of new homes for sale would take 3.9 months to sell at the current rate of sales, down from 4.8 months in the previous report and 4.2 months in the year-earlier report.
The median U.S. new-home sales price in April 2016 was $321,100, while the average price was $379,800.
