New-home sales crawled to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 307,000 in December despite modest signs of recovery.

The Commerce Department said Thursday that new-home sales fell 2.2 percent below expectations from November, which held that homebuyers would pick up a seasonally adjusted 314,000 homes annually.

New homes from last month carried a median sales price around $210,300, with the average sales price hovering around $266,000.

Last year marked the sale of just 302,000 new homes, reflecting a 6.2-percent decline from figures seen in 2010. A story in The Washington Post Thursday found that new-home sales plunged to their lowest in roughly half a century.

Experts said in past interviews with MReport that ebbing

unemployment and steady job growth – although helpful to the economic recovery and first-time homebuyers – fall flat on frequent contract failures, still-tight credit, and a slow pace for new home construction.

The National Association of Realtors (NAR) said Wednesday that pending-home sales also slid back, deploying a forward-looking index that found contract signings on the decline by 3.5 percent in December.

“Even with a modest decline, the preceding two months of contract activity are the highest in the past four years outside of the homebuyer tax credit period,” Lawrence Yun, chief economist with NAR, said of the figures in a statement.

“Contract failures remain an issue, reported by one-third of Realtors over the past few months, but home buyers are not giving up,” he added.

Paul Diggle, a property economist with consultancy Capital Economics, chalked up lower-than-expected new-home sales in December to a continuing foreclosure glut and discounts from short sales.

“The bottom line is that new home sales are unlikely to rise significantly from their current ultra-low level while they are having to compete with deeply discounted foreclosures and short sales,” he wrote in a note Thursday.

He said that a possible stabilization in home prices may be near, even while the Federal Housing Finance Agency reported Wednesday that prices declined by 1.8 percent year-over-year in November.