?EUR??,,????'??The crisis in the subprime sector has infected other parts of the mortgage market as well as consumer psychology, and as a result the housing outlook has deteriorated,?EUR??,,????'?? NAHB Chief Economist David Seiders said. ?EUR??,,????'??We?EUR??,,????'???re now projecting that home sales and housing production will not begin improving until late this year, and we?EUR??,,????'???re expecting the early stages of the subsequent recovery to be quite sluggish.?EUR??,,????'??

Derived from a monthly survey that NAHB has been conducting for more than 20 years, the NAHB/Wells Fargo HMI gauges builder perceptions of current single-family home sales and sales expectations for the next six months as either ?EUR??,,????'??good,?EUR??,,????'?? ?EUR??,,????'??fair?EUR??,,????'?? or ?EUR??,,????'??poor.?EUR??,,????'?? The survey also asks builders to rate traffic of prospective buyers as either ?EUR??,,????'??high to very high,?EUR??,,????'?? ?EUR??,,????'??average?EUR??,,????'?? or ?EUR??,,????'??low to very low.?EUR??,,????'?? Scores for each component are then used to calculate a seasonally adjusted index where any number over 50 indicates that more builders view sales conditions as good than poor.

All three component indexes declined in May. The index gauging current single-family sales slipped two points to 31, while the index gauging sales expectations for the next six months fell three points to 41 and the index gauging traffic of prospective buyers fell four points to 23.