New home sales posted hefty year-over-year increases in April and showed another cause for optimism among builders.
The housing recovery continued rolling along this morning, with the Commerce Department reporting that new home sales rose 9.9 percent in April from last year.
Sales rose 3.3 percent from March to April, and year-over-year median price of new properties rose 4.9 percent.
Other important information in the Commerce Department’s report included:
- Inventory of new homes rose 1.4 percent, but at 5.1 months supply, it remains near record lows.
- The past three months, new home sales are 14 percent higher than they were in 2011.
Sales in the Midwest rose 28 percent, while increasing 7.7 percent in the Northeast and 27.5 percent in the West.
Interestingly, only sales in the South fell, and the 10.6 percent decline could not be further from what Christi Borden, a Realtor with Prudential Gary Greene in Katy who is on the board of directors at both the Houston and Texas Association of Realtors, has experienced in her area of Houston.
Between Katy and the Woodlands, Borden said demand for new construction has been very high, so high that inventory in the Woodlands has been running low.
Unlike other regional markets, Borden said builders in the Houston area, for the most part, were careful not to overbuild during the boom years, so construction and new home sales did not drop in the area quite as dramatically as in other areas.
“We’ve always been up,” she said. “In ’07, we saw a flattening of sales … but builders have been smart.”
And since the market did not fall as far, Borden explained increases will not increase as much, though there is “definitely an increase” in the Houston area.