Sales of new U.S. homes plunge over 11% in April
WASHINGTON — U.S. sales of new homes last month registered the biggest drop in more than two years.
The Commerce Department said Tuesday that new-home sales skidded 11.4 percent in April to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 569,000. It was the biggest monthly drop since March 2015. Economists had expected a more modest retreat from March sales of 642,000, which were the highest since October 2007. Sales in April were still up 0.5 percent from a year earlier.
Economists were inclined to view the April reading as a one-month blip. Ian Shepherdson, economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, called the drop “a correction from the March cycle high, not a warning sign.”
The median sales price of a new home slid 3 percent to $309,200. There were 268,000 new homes for sale in April, the most since July 2009.
On Wall Street, stocks rose for the fourth day in a row Tuesday as they continued to recover the ground they lost last week.
“The market was simply reminded that there’s political risk out there, and it reacted to that reminder,” said Matthew Peterson, strategist for LPL Financial.
Peterson said he doesn’t think long-term investors have made big changes to their portfolios in response to last week’s drop, which followed allegations that President Donald Trump asked the FBI to end an investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn.