Looking to 2015 with this lower 4th Quarter gross margin comparable to the prior year as a starting point, we know that our gross margin will continue to lag the prior year count for some time. As a result, we are projecting our 1st Quarter 2015 gross margin to drop significantly from the 1st Quarter of 2014, hitting the low point for the year before improving sequentially for the remaining three quarters of 2014. As we often observe, there is no one item that will drive an improvement in gross margin as a menu of many actions in both revenue and cost when you are aggressively addressing all of that. Although at this time we do not expect to reach our housing gross profit margin goal of 20% in 2015 as we had hoped, this remains the target level we are working towards for the near future.
Moving on to the sales and traffic transferred for quarter our net order value increased for $587 million up 22% on a yearly increase of 10%. This increase in the orders is consistent with our average community count growth for the quarter of 13%. As we shared, we will continue to balance price and pace to optimize each asset and expect our sales rate per community will not increase until we achieve our targeted growth margins. In the meantime, we do expect that our future order growth will coincide within the range of our community count growth. Our traffic levels per community remained strong; up 15% over the prior year. This data point reinforces that there continues to be strong interest in home ownership. Our year-end backlog value rose to $914 million, a 34% increase over the prior year, and our highest year in backlog value since 2007. Between our backlog position, our growing community count and our product mix continuing to generate a higher ASP. We are well positioned to drive unit and revenue growth entering 2015.
Before I review our key priorities looking forward, I would like to re-visit the journey we have been on over the past few years. As we entered 2012, we knew that we would need to further accelerate revenue growth in order to achieve and sustain profitability. We announced at that time that we were going on an offence and it was a rowing cry within our organization. We made significant investments in land and lots to grow community count and repositioned our locations and products within our current business footprints, while, at the same time minimizing overhead increases as we supported this growth strategy. Our 2014 resolves reflect a combination of these actions. With these profits we achieved our short term goal of recognizing the DTA reversal. Now that we have established the larger scale and sustained profitability, we will be expanding our focus to not only growing our revenues and enhancing profitability but also to improving our returns. Due to the investments we have made we own and control all the lots needed for our 2015 business and substantially all the lots needed for 2016.
Having now made significant progress with our land pipeline and in profitability, in May 2014 we began augmenting this focus with a greater emphasis on enhancing our asset efficiency and improving our returns on investing capital. As part of these efforts we have been evaluating potential opportunities to more quickly monetize certain long term development assets in order to re-deploy the capital in the more productive assets that have a shorter life cycle. In that regard, in October, we sold our last remaining land position in Atlanta, a market where we no longer have ongoing operations.
In addition, we have increased our efforts to reactivate properties previously held for future development in various markets where we continue to operate. Reflecting this change in our corporate strategy to more quickly monetize certain long held development assets we recorded inventory impairment charges of $34 million in Q-4 related to 7 properties. The majority, or $23 million, of these impairment charges related to an 80 acre land parcel located in the Coachella Valley area of Southern California, a sub market that has not recovered as quickly as we had anticipated. Similar to Atlanta, this is a market where we no longer actively participate. This particular property which was earmarked as an active adult community is not aligned with our core business and will require significant additional investment dollars in land development and infrastructure for an extended period of time to be built out.
