SALES: Figures for January off from a year before, but average price up

January auto sales were down slightly in the Houston region from the same period a year earlier, but continued strong demand for trucks and SUVs pushed the average retail sales price to a record $36,357.

During the month, 27,410 vehicles were sold in the nine-county metro area, a decline of 0.7 percent from January 2014, according to the monthly TexAuto Facts report compiled by InfoNation of Sugar Land. However, retail sales — vehicles sold through dealerships — rose 0.3 percent to 23,642, data show.

In January, trucks and SUVs — 63.9 percent of retail vehicles sold in the Houston area — cost on average about $8,500 more than cars, InfoNation owner Steve McDowell said. That suggests the continued rise in average price likely isn’t driven by inflation.

InfoNation also released more information about the record 2015 sales year.

In 2015, the average age of cars and light truck vehicles in operation on

Houston-area roadways fell slightly to 8.67 years. That’s still about three years younger than the national average, which Houston historically trails, McDowell said.

Of the region’s vehicles, 36.6 percent are between 1 and 5 years old.

“It tells me that we don’t have a lot of pentup demand,” McDowell said.

The need to replace vehicles is one of the factors dealers have said contrib- uted to the record annual numbers of recent years.

In 2015, 376,481 vehicles were sold, marking the sixth continuous year of annual sales increases. Projections are that 2016 sales could f all about 4 percent, which would still put the year among the highest-grossing of the last decade.

Nationally, 1.15 million vehicles were sold in January, down 0.4 percent from a year earlier.