"I don't really understand why it should be so bad," said Diane Williams, of Weichert Realtors in Spring House, Montgomery County, who has been selling new and existing homes in the eastern part of the county for 24 years.
"It's an enigma," Williams said. "It's bad even though interest rates are great. Some builders are even going as far as saying that it's dead."
Maybe not dead, but as Wayne Norris, regional sales director of Hanley Wood Market Intelligence, observed, the new-home market "is showing varying signs of stabilization."
Hanley Wood Market Intelligence is an independent collector of new-home sales data. Its third-quarter figures show that sales in this region declined 13.4 percent from the same period in 2006 - much less than in Phoenix (down 56 percent), Washington (down 50.1 percent) and Chicago (down 40 percent).
"Most markets have experienced a tougher third quarter than year-to-date," Norris said, "due, in large part, to the subprime crisis, which has kept buyers out for psychological reasons or because many cannot qualify in the current environment."
Builder confidence was at a low point in October, according to the National Association of Home Builders. President Brian Catalde said that builder incentives attracted some interest, but that potential buyers were holding out for better deals.
Incentives have included a weekend "fire sale" by K. Hovnanian in mid-September. After the central New Jersey-based builder offered price breaks up to $100,000 on its homes, it signed 2,100 contracts nationwide.
So far, few builders have followed suit; some have criticized Hovnanian's strategy.
