Investors will pay close attention to December new home sales Friday in an attempt to assess the state of the struggling industry. The Commerce Department is slated to release the statistics at 10 a.m. On Thursday, the National Association of Realtors said sales of U.S. existing homes fell 0.8 percent in December to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 6.22 million. That was a larger drop than the 0.6 percent decline analysts expected, and helped pushed the broad market indexes down. The results, combined with a handful of housing construction companies reporting falling profits for the quarter, took homebuilders' stocks into negative territory as well. The Philadelphia Housing Index was down 2.3 percent Thursday. The existing home sales drop came after two months of gains, and market watchers were hoping for further signs of stability in the sector. Likewise, November's new home sales bounced back from an October decline, to show increases in three of the previous four months. The results were seen as a sign that the housing market was recovering. Wall Street has forecast another small gain for December sales, according to Briefing.com, partly on the hope that unusually warm weather buoyed the market. But even meeting expectations for a 0.8 percent improvement for the month will still leave home sales down 16 percent for the year, and a hefty 23 percent below the peak in July 2005