A new report released yesterday by the U.S. Census Bureau that shows that more new homes were sold in July than in nearly a decade, the New York Times DealBook blog reported. Buyers purchased single-family houses at the annual rate of 654,000, the highest rate since October 2007, the government said. That is 31 percent higher than a year earlier. Those numbers are volatile and include a wide margin of error, but combined with other evidence, the United States housing market seems to be solidly on the mend in 2016. Builders have started work on new housing units at a pace of more than 1 million homes a year every month since April 2015, more than doubling from a low of 478,000 in the spring of 2009. In the new Census Bureau report, the median sale price for new homes actually fell, to $294,600 from $310,500 in June.
