Housing inventories remain high

Hovnanian Enterprises, the big New Jersey-based homebuilder, managed to cut its number of unsold houses by 50 percent over the past two years, but only after making some substantial price cuts. It still had 1,500 unsold homes on the market as of April. The company doesn’t build without a buyer lined up anymore, Chief Financial Officer Larry Sorsby said in an interview. Sales dropped 7.4 percent in April from the previous year. Across the U.S., about 3.9 million single-family homes are unsold, the most since the National Association of Realtors started compiling data in 1982.