The number of people buying new homes plunged in February to the fewest on records dating back nearly half a century, a dismal sign for an already-weak housing market, The Associated Press reports.
New-home sales fell 16.9 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 250,000 homes, the Commerce Department said Wednesday. It’s the third straight monthly decline and far below the 700,000-a-year pace that economists view as healthy.
The median price of a new home dropped nearly 14 percent to $202,100, the lowest since December 2003. The median is now 30 percent higher than the median price of resold homes — twice the markup typical in healthy housing markets.
