New Home Sales

Purchases of new single-family houses in the U.S. decreased in March to the lowest level since November amid elevated prices and rising mortgage rates. Here are the main takeaways from the Commerce Department's report released Tuesday:

--New home sales fell 8.6% in March on month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 763,000.

--Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal expected home sales to decline 0.3% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 770,000.

--New home sales in February were upwardly revised to 835,000 from an earlier estimate of 772,000.

--Sales were 12.6% below the same month a year earlier, when they stood at an adjusted annual rate of 873,000.

--Monthly new residential sales data is volatile and often revised. Data for March came with a margin of error of 12.9 percentage points.

--The median price of a new home rose in March to $436,700 from $421,600 the previous month.

--The seasonally adjusted estimate of new houses for sale at the end of March was 407,000. This represents a supply of 6.4 months at the current sales rate.

Source: MarketWatch