Healthy job growth and a recovering economy have pushed up interest in new homes, while the prospect of rising mortgage rates since the November presidential election may have pulled some sales forward. "Sales were likely boosted by the much warmer-than-usual weather last month, which made visiting new-home construction sites less miserable than usual in February," said Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics. Construction firms are bullish that sales will keep improving, even though they remain well below the heights of the housing boom seen more than a decade ago.