Home Sales Rise; Prices Still Weak : Real estate: Spring resales were up more than 19% but did not spark the market for new housing.

Despite the strongest spring selling season since 1988, Orange County home sales for the first half of 1991 barely inched ahead of the sluggish pace of the two prior years, according to a new survey released Monday.

And the average selling price of a home in the county during the first six months of the year reflected the continuing weak market conditions, dropping 3% to $243,191 from $250,728 in the first half of 1990, according to figures compiled by TRW Marketing Services.

Average prices in the first half dropped in both the new and resale markets, with resales taking the steepest plunge, down 3% to $237,156 from $244,567 in the January-through-June period of 1990. The average sales price for new homes dropped 1.7% to $266,654 from $271,342, according to the TRW unit’s monthly data.

The soft prices have helped boost resale activity in the county but have not helped sales of new homes. Developers have been holding off on new construction for months in an effort to deplete the inventory of unsold units that built up when the Southern California real estate market hit the skids in mid-1989.

Thus, the number of new homes sold in the county through June 30 dropped 12.8% to 2,972 units from 3,408 a year earlier, the TRW statistics show.

At the same time, the number of recorded resale transactions in Orange County rose 3% to 20,333 from 19,733 in the first half of 1990.

Most of that activity came in the spring, when 12,481 resale transactions closed, up 19.2% from 10,468 in April, May and June of 1990.

Total spring sales this year hit 14,288, up 14.7% from 12,450 a year earlier and the largest number of spring transactions in Orange County since 17,950 sales were recorded in 1988.

Orange County Average Home Prices 1989, Sept.:$261,097 1091, June: $248,689 Source: TRW Marketing Services