Forecast Anticipates Rise In New Home Sales

New home sales in January are expected to reach 549,000, a 2.4 percent increase from December and 4.4 percent gain from a year ago. Also, by the same time next year, new home sales are slated to jump 10.1 percent to 579,000 units.

Citing research from the National Association of Realtors, the January forecast from Zillow indicates that existing home sales are expected to fall 0.3 percent in January from December, which works out to 5.47 million units at a seasonally adjusted annual rate.

In the late 1980s, about 40 percent of new home starts were in the Southern United States; today that share is upward of 50 percent. As new construction activity has shifted toward parts of the country with warmer climates, winter stoppages/slowdowns have become less prominent in aggregate home sales data.

Read more