November 30, 2007 (LPAC)--The U.S. Department of Commerce reported yesterday that the median price of a new single family home is $217,800, 13 percent lower than one year ago. This was the biggest drop recorded since 1963, when the Department first began to compute these prices. The second biggest was 8.5 percent in 1970. New home sales in October were up 1.7 percent from September, to a seasonally adjusted 728,000 homes per annum, which is 23.5 percent lower than a year earlier. New homes account for about 15 percent of all home sales.