Home Sales in State Lowest in Last Decade : Housing: April’s rate is down 29.1% from year-ago level, prompting concerns of economic slowdown. O.C. is off 41.1%.

Raising fears about a slowdown in the state’s economy, the pace of existing home sales in California last month sank to their lowest level in more than a decade in the wake of the winter storms and weakening consumer confidence, according to figures released Thursday.

The rate of single-family home sales in April fell 8.6% from March’s revised figures to an annualized rate of 357,720 homes, according to the California Assn. of Realtors. April’s sales rate is down a steep 29.1% from April, 1994, levels.

The last time that the pace of sales was lower was in September, 1984, when existing homes sold at an annual rate of 328,720, the association said.

Orange County was among the hardest-hit areas in the state, with the number of home sales down 41.1% from April, 1994. Orange County’s poor results were, in part, due to the county’s Dec. 6 bankruptcy filing, brokers said.

Los Angeles County was one of the state’s least-affected areas, with home sales down 14.5% from last year.

“Slipping consumer confidence and the impact of severe winter storms during late February and March led to the decline we experienced in completed home sales during April,” said Ed Albers, CAR’s president and a real estate broker in Sacramento.

Home sales across the country also fell in another sign that the national economy is slowing faster than expected. If true, that could spell trouble for the California economy, whose modest recovery seems to have stalled in recent months.

The Labor Department reported on Thursday that new claims for jobless benefits approached a 10-month high, and the Commerce Department said on Wednesday that durable goods orders posted the biggest drop in 3 1/2 years.

The National Assn. of Realtors said Thursday said that home sales nationwide fell 6.4% in April from March to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 3.39 million. That’s 17.5% below the sales rate of April, 1994, and the lowest since June, 1992.

On a regional basis, the sales rate remained flat in the Northeast at 550,000 homes. But the rate sank in the rest of the country, falling 8.1% to 1.24 million in the South, 6.3% to 900,000 in the Midwest, and 6.6% to 710,000 homes in the West.

Housing analysts said that falling consumer confidence had offset the benefits from dropping mortgage rates, which had been expected to prop up sales. The rate for a fixed-rate, 30-year mortgage averaged 8.32% in April, down from the recent high of 9.19% last December, according to the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp.

“Clearly, there is great consumer uneasiness out there in the housing market,” said Edmund G. Woods Jr., president of the National Assn. of Realtors. “This uneasiness seems to be driven by a number of economic factors, including a slowdown in job growth and overall economic growth.”

But the national and state real estate industry leaders remained optimistic about the rest of the year if mortgage rates continue to fall.

“The Fed’s decision [this week] to leave interest rates untouched points toward stabilizing mortgage rates in the coming months, and this certainly bodes well for California’s housing market,” said Leslie Appleton-Young, chief economist for the California Assn. of Realtors.

Many California real estate observers, however, remained wary about the outlook for the rest of the year. Wells Fargo Bank economist Chris Taylor says the state’s lethargic economic recovery and weak home prices will continue to depress the real estate market.

“The decline in interest rates will help stimulate activity,” said Taylor. “But there are other factors that will hold activity below last year’s levels.”

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Times wire services contributed to this report.