NEW YORK -- D.R. Horton Inc., the largest U.S. home builder, Thursday reported its first quarterly loss as a public company as it took more than $1 billion of charges, chiefly related to the lower value of land and other assets.

The results, along with a cringing report on U.S. June new home sales, helped send D.R. Horton's stock down to a price not seen since September 2003.

For its fiscal third quarter ended June 30, D.R. Horton posted a loss of $823.8 million, or $2.62 per share, versus a profit of $292.8 million, or 93 cents per share, in the year-earlier quarter.

The results included charges totaling nearly $1.28 billion, of which $835.8 million went for write-downs of projects in California, Las Vegas, Florida, Denver and the Northeast. The Fort Worth, Texas, home builder recorded an additional charge of $425.6 million for goodwill impairment.

The charges come to about 12 percent of the company's book value, Bank of America analyst Daniel Oppenheim said in a research note.

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"While we think the market was prepared for a significant charge, we suspect that these charges of $1.28 billion are larger than most everyone expected for the quarter," he wrote.

Home-building revenue fell 31 percent, to $2.5 billion in the year-earlier quarter, as the number of homes sold fell 28 percent to 9,643 and the average selling price fell 6 percent to $252,800.

Earlier this month, the company said net sales orders in the quarter fell 40 percent to 8,559 homes. The dollar value of the orders dropped 47 percent to $2.0 billion, as the average selling price for the orders fell 11.5 percent to $237,000.

"I will tell you that we don't see a lot of strength in any of our markets currently," Chief Executive Don Tomnitz told analysts. "We don't see any positives in a number of our markets.

The company's traditional customers are first- or second-time home buyers. It builds homes in 27 states with sales prices starting at about $90,000 and going all the way up to $900,000.

The U.S. housing market's downward spiral continues to thrash new-home builders, and several builders have said they expect the decline to continue well into next year.

Thursday, the U.S. Commerce Department said sales of new U.S. homes fell 6.6 percent in June as the median sales price of a new home fell 1.3 percent to $237,900 from $241,000 in May. The department also said the number of new homes for sale in June would take 7.8 months to sell, up from 7.4 months a month before.

It's not surprising that the National Association of Home Builders said U.S. home builder sentiment during July fell to its lowest level in 16 years.

Many leading U.S. home builders have said that they don't expect their business to improve until the glut of existing homes on the market is drastically reduced.

Earlier this week, the National Association of Realtors said that the pace of U.S. existing single-family home sales fell 3.5 percent from the prior month and that inventory of single-family homes for sale rose to its highest level since June 1992.

D.R. Horton shares reached a low of $16.46 before recovering ground and traded at $16.86, down 62 cents, or 3.6 percent, in afternoon activity on the New York Stock Exchange. Year-to-date, D.R. Horton shares are off 36 percent, not far from the 37 percent slide of the Dow Jones U.S. Home Construction Index, a yardstick that measures the sector's performance.

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