New Home Sales Fall 9% in January
New home sales fell 9 percent in January, pushing sales activity to its slowest pace since the end of the last recession, the government said yesterday as the housing industry continued to stagger following the October stock market collapse.</br></br>A downturn in housing has often been the harbinger of the onset of a recession, but analysts said they believed falling mortgage rates offered the hope of a rebound in home sales in coming months.</br></br>In January, the Commerce Department said that sales of new single-family homes fell for the third consecutive month, dropping to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 535,000 units, 26 percent below a year ago and the slowest pace since the last recession was ending in December 1982.</br></br>In a second lackluster economic report, the Commerce Department said orders for manufactured goods fell 0.6 percent in January to a seasonally adjusted $212.6 billion.</br></br>While this was the first decline in five months, analysts noted that it followed an unusually large 2 percent December increase, a gain that reflected a big jump in demand for jet aircraft.