WASHINGTON — Home-building probably dropped in December and sales of existing houses struggled to rebound from a post-tax credit slump, reflecting a market trying to regain its footing more than a year into the economic recovery, economists said before reports this week.

Builders began work on 550,000 houses at an annual rate, down 0.9 percent from November, according to the median estimate of 61 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News before Commerce Department data is released Wednesday. Other reports may show that purchases of previously owned homes rose for a second month, and a gauge of the economic outlook climbed.

“The main reason we’re not in a more typical booming recovery after a deep recession is that typically housing at this point would be growing very rapidly,” said Dean Maki, chief U.S. economist at Barclays Capital in New York. “It does not appear likely that it’s going to be a large contributor to growth anytime soon.”

Home builders have underperformed the broader stock market. The Standard & Poor’s Supercomposite Homebuilder Index climbed 2.3 percent last year, compared with a 13 percent gain for the S&P 500 Index.

The projected drop in December starts would follow a 3.9 percent increase in November that was the first gain in three months.

Builders had little incentive to take on work when house purchases slumped in mid-2010 after the expiration of a tax incentive of as much as $8,000, which required contracts to be signed by April 30, 2010, and closed by the end of September.

While housing remains a weak link of the economy, sales of existing homes have begun recovering from the July 2010 slump that pushed them to the weakest rate in a decade’s worth of record-keeping. Purchases of previously owned houses rose 3.8 percent in December to a 4.86 million annual pace from the prior month, economists forecast in the Bloomberg survey. The National Association of Realtors will release the figures on Jan. 20.

Meanwhile, a Conference Board report due out Thursday is expected to be positive on prospects for the world’s largest economy. The New York-based group’s index of leading indicators rose 0.6 percent in December, the sixth straight gain, according to the Bloomberg survey median.