Washington – The U.S. economy is ending the year with a hopeful set of reports showing that consumer confidence soared in December and the worst of the downturn for the battered housing market may be over.
The Conference Board reported Thursday that consumer confidence shot to an eight-month high of 109.0 in December.
That was only slightly below April’s 109.8, when confidence had hit the highest point in four years before soaring gasoline prices and a slumping housing market took their toll on Americans’ perception of the future.
Meanwhile, the National Association of Realtors reported that sales of existing homes edged up 0.6 percent in November to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 6.28 million units, after a 0.5 percent rise in sales in October.
It marked the first back-to- back increases in sales of existing homes since the spring of 2005 and followed news Wednesday that sales of new homes rose 3.4 percent last month.
The better-than-expected showing could be signaling that this year’s slide in housing is starting to bottom out, analysts said.
However, they cautioned not to expect a sharp rebound. Rather, they said they look for prices to continue falling for several more months as sellers are forced to trim their asking prices more in the face of near-record levels of unsold homes.
For October, the median price for an existing home fell for a record fourth straight month, dropping to $218,000, down 3.1 percent from a year ago.
