New home sales up 5.2 percent

If you didn’t read past today’s headlines, all you know about February new home sales is that they plunged at the steepest rate in 9 years.

What you didn’t learn from the headlines is that a 29.4 percent drop in sales in the West accounted for most of the pain.

According to the US Commerce Department report (PDF file) Midwestern home sales actually rose at a 5.2 percent pace over January sales. Northeast had a double-digit rise, at 12.4 percent.

Oh, and if you relied only on the New York Times – the newspaper of record – you didn’t get any of the detail.

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